During my so-called career I spent more than twelve years as a law enforcement officer, including nine years as a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio.

Law enforcement is a remarkably educational occupation. And the lessons you learn are sometimes burned into your psyche.  Not everyone has the opportunity to work in law enforcement, so for those who never donned the uniform, here are a couple of things I learned during my law enforcement career:

1. It’s not personal. 

Don’t make it personal, be professional.  You are not the most important person in everyone else’s life.  What other people do usually has nothing to do with you. When you put on a uniform, everybody you encounter will respond to the uniform, not to the person inside.

2. Life is unfair.  

No surprise here, but it bears repeating. Not everybody has the same opportunities. Some kids have doctors and lawyers for parents, others have knuckleheads or drug dealers. No one gets to choose their parents or the circumstances in which they will live their early years. Bad things do happen to good people. Victims aren’t always at fault. Disease, disaster, and death are random, and life can be tragically short.  People don’t get the life they deserve, they get the life they get. 

3.  Violence is never the answer.

It’s just not. As Americans, we’re surrounded by violence: physical, verbal, emotional, economic. We glorify it. Violence is pervasive at the movies, on TV, on videogames, at school, and next door. Police are empowered to employ violence in the interest of public safety, not because they want to, or because they are well-trained or well-prepared to do so, because mostly they aren’t, but because there is no one else. Whatever the short-term effects of violence, the long-term effects are always negative. Always. That doesn’t mean that police should never employ violence, even deadly force.  The reason the police exist is because somebody has to be authorized to use violence in support of the public good. But there is always a cost – to the community and to the officer.

4.  Everybody just wants to get along.

Maybe not everybody, but certainly the vast majority of people. It doesn’t matter where they live. It doesn’t matter how they look.  It doesn’t matter where they came from or where they want to go.  Most people just want to live their lives peacefully with dignity and respect. 

5.  People who live in the ghetto didn’t create the ghetto.

Don’t blame them.  Widespread disinvestment, loss of jobs, illegal dumping, greed, redlining, housing discrimination, inferior schools, industrial pollution, and all the other things that make some neighborhoods highly undesirable were not caused by the people who live there today. Large-scale economic, political, and social forces acting over decades created the inner cities that we struggle with today.  The people that live in the inner city – and the people that live in other areas of the community – are victims of these forces, not perpetrators.

6.  There are two sides to every street.

And two sides to every story. The first story you hear is not likely to be the complete story. So, it is important to withhold judgement or a decision until everyone else gets their say.

7.  The truth is out there. Way out there.

Good luck finding it. Police officers quickly learn that the people they are talking to are frequently less than honest. When the police are called to adjudicate a dispute, usually everyone involved is at least partially at fault, but that’s not how they are going to tell it.  (“So, you say she walked up to you and just whacked you with a baseball bat for no reason at all. Are you sure you didn’t say something to her first? Are you sure nothing at all happened before she hit you?  You know, she says it wasn’t quite like that…”)

Not everyone lies to the police all the time, of course, but it doesn’t take long before new police officers realize that they need to be skeptical of just about everything anyone tells them. Sometimes people misunderstand or misinterpret what they see, and sometimes they simply don’t want to tell the truth. And a few people seem entirely incapable of telling the truth. In the long run, this is pretty unhelpful to police-community relations and the mental health of police officers.

8.  Evil exists.

The human capacity for inflicting pain, suffering, and terror on other humans is, apparently, infinite. Although they get a lot of attention, spectacular incidents of depravity are rare. But casual evil – thoughtless, self-serving cruelties intended to damage another person – happen every day. 

9. So does kindness. 

Compassion, generosity, and kindness are more common than evil, although, as a cop, you probably wouldn’t know it.

10.  Criminals are regular people, except when they are not.

There are people who, for whatever reason, are simply unable to live decent lives.  They lie, steal, cheat, threaten, and abuse at every opportunity. While they are a very small percentage of the population, they commit the vast majority of crimes.  If your town has 100 burglaries a year, it doesn’t have 100 burglars.  It probably has two or three burglars.

But even the burglars next door are regular neighbors most of the time.  They shop at the same stores as you, put out their trash on the same days, and root for the same sports teams.

And most people who commit crimes are not actually career criminals.  They are people who made a pretty bad choice, or maybe a couple of bad choices, but they are not irredeemably bad. There is no criminality gene, no neighborhood where everyone is a criminal, no racial, ethnic, religious, or economic group that is composed entirely of criminals.

Of course, these are things that I learned, or had reinforced in my time as a police officer. My experiences are specific to a particular department at a particular time, and cannot represent the enormous variety of law enforcement experience. Other officers, with different backgrounds, different life experiences, and different perspectives would create a different list.

March 1, 2019

Photos from the Cleveland Police Historical Society

In 1975, when 12-year-old Edward Vernon told police he couldn’t identify suspects in a daylight murder that he claimed to have witnessed, angry detectives threatened to arrest his parents unless he identified the killers.

That threat set in motion a years-long chain of misconduct, incompetence, fear-based silence, and official malfeasance that resulted in the wrongful incarceration of three men for a total of 106 years.

More than 35 years later, prompted by a 2011 newspaper account of the trial that pointed out obvious discrepancies in Vernon’s testimony and described the shoddy police investigation, Vernon recanted his story, leading to the release of two men who had been imprisoned for more than 35 years for a crime they didn’t commit. At the time it was believed to be the longest wrongful incarceration in U.S. history.

The author of that 2011 newspaper article was 25-year-old Kyle Swenson, a reporter for the weekly Scene Magazine in Cleveland. Today, Swenson is a reporter for the Washington Post, and yesterday he spoke at the Cleveland City Club about the case, which he has written about in a new book, Good Kids, Bad City.

No physical evidence linked 17-year-old Ronnie Bridgeman, 18-year-old Rickie Jackson, and Ronnie’s 20-year-old brother, Wiley Bridgeman, to the robbery and murder of money order salesman, Harry J. Frank, on the sidewalk in front of a white-brick inner city convenience store in Cleveland’s predominantly black east side on May 19, 1975. The prosecution’s case depended entirely upon the testimony of a 12-year-old neighborhood child who told police he saw the crime. The three young men had alibi witnesses who told police that the arrested men were not at the store during the crime. Two witnesses to the crime failed to identify the suspects. Other neighborhood residents told detectives that the young men were innocent, and several residents provided police with the names and descriptions of other men who were said to have committed the murder. Even the FBI provided police with the names of other possible suspects.

But while some leads were investigated by Cleveland detectives, their follow-up was perfunctory. They were focused on the three young men in custody and seemed uninterested in information that might clear them. There was still no physical evidence to link them to the crime.

Despite the weakness of the prosecution’s case, all three men were convicted and sentenced to death. They escaped execution only because the United States Supreme Court struck down Ohio’s death penalty law in 1977.

Because the three young men had requested separate trials, their sentences were not identical. Thus, in 2003, twenty-eight years after being arrested for a crime he did not commit, Ronnie Bridgeman was released on parole. But his brother, Wiley, and their friend, Rickie, remained in prison.

By the time he was freed, Ronnie Bridgeman had changed his name to Kwame Ajamu in an effort to distance himself from his past. But he couldn’t escape from the reality that his brother and friend remained wrongly incarcerated. Ajamu began contacting people who might help him in his efforts to free Wiley and Ricky. In 2011 he contacted the young reporter, Swenson.

As Swenson recalls, he was not immediately convinced that Ajamu’s story was true. Even an inexperienced journalist knew that many people lie to reporters. At the time, Swenson told the City Club audience, “I was less jaded than I might be today.”

But after meeting Ajamu; listening to his story over a series of interviews; studying trial transcripts, police case files, and other documents; and talking to dozens of people about the case; Swenson became convinced of Ajamu’s innocence.

One person who would not talk to Swenson was Edward Vernon, whose testimony convicted the three men. Vernon had overcome drug addiction, which Swenson said was connected to the fear and guilt he felt about his role in the convictions. Vernon was afraid that if he became involved in the case again, he would relapse.

But even without Vernon’s help, in 2011 Swenson published a detailed account of the crime, the trial, and its aftermath in the weekly Scene Magazine. And nothing happened. Vernon would not come forward and recant his testimony and the legal system was unmoved.

“I thought there would be some redress,” said Swenson. “That something would happen. I felt that I had let Kwame down, that the story hadn’t done what we wanted it to.”

But the story had caught the attention of attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project. They believed Ajamu, Jackson, and Bridgeman were innocent, and that Vernon was the key. They pressed him to come forward, and in 2014, he did. In November, 2014, Vernon spent a harrowing day testifying at a court hearing. He recanted his earlier testimony and withstood hours of aggressive questioning by a district attorney. As a result, Jackson and Bridgeman were freed.

Vernon testified that his participation in the original trials had ruined his life. He had told detectives that he couldn’t identify the three men. But detectives had threatened to jail his parents if he did not identify them. “You don’t know how much pain and suffering I have been going through throughout these years,” he said in court. “You and nobody else knows. You can ask a thousand questions and it is still not going to free me from the pain and the hurt and the lies I had to live.”

Today, Ajamu, Bridgeman, and Jackson are free men. They have received compensation from the State of Ohio for the time they spent in prison, and a lawsuit they have filed against the City of Cleveland is pending. They have forgiven Vernon. “You can’t live with that hate for decades,” Ajamu told Swenson.

This story is not just about a kid who lied, said Swenson. “This case was a system failure.”

When he first began talking to Ajamu, Swenson was unconvinced. He had thought that the criminal justice system had guardrails to prevent people from being wrongfully imprisoned. But nothing as solid as a guardrail exists. The safety features that do exist were simply inadequate.

Like any system failure, the sequence of events that led to the wrongful conviction was lengthy. Had things been done differently at any point in the failure chain, the outcome could have been different. Had the police been better trained, or had detectives been more diligent, had the detective’s supervisors noted the discrepancies in the case, had the prosecutor been willing to question the police investigation, had neighborhood residents not been afraid to tell the police what they knew, had defense attorneys presented a better defense, had the jury demanded more proof than the testimony of a frightened 12-year-old, had any of these things happened, three innocent men might have been spared decades in prison.

It is chilling to think that had the death sentences remained in effect, all three men would have been executed.

“One of my fears,” said Swenson, “is that people would see this case as old history, that things like this don’t happen anymore. But that’s not the case at all. These cases are not old. They are still happening.”

For a comprehensive account of the trial, investigation and aftermath, see Good Kids, Bad City, by Kyle Swenson: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120236

February 20, 2019