Why Should I Harass People for Standing on the Corner?
Harlon Keith Moss Jr.
In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.
Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.
Critics claim that street violence in Chicago has been made worse in recent years by an inadequate number of police officers on the street. A 2009 analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times, for example, showed that once various factors were taken into account, the Chicago Police Department was nearly 2,000 officers short of its authorized strength of 13,500. The city planned to hire 500 new officers in 2013, but Fraternal Order of Police President Mike Shields insisted that number was far short of what was needed to keep the neighborhoods safe. “If Chicago wants to lose the title ‘homicide capital of the nation,’” he said, “it’s time to get serious about increasing the number of patrolmen and detectives on the street. We at least need to hire 1,400 officers. That’s at a minimum.”
One man who knows the effects of this manpower shortage all too well is Harlon Keith Moss Jr. Born in the city, he was a Chicago police officer for more than 20 years until leaving the force in 2010. He has spent his retirement resting, spending time with family and traveling with the Buffalo Troopers, an African-American motorcycle club.
At the time of the interview, he sits in the comfort of his house, wearing a black jogging suit and still sporting his Chicago Police Department ring. He eagerly waits to start the discussion, ready to offer candid views on the lack of officers on the street and other challenges facing the force—including infiltration of gang members into the ranks.
When I first started on the job, I trained in Englewood, which is one of the most dangerous areas in the city of Chicago and, I believe, the most dangerous area on the South Side of Chicago. But there’s just more gun violence now. These kids, they pick up a gun and they’re more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. And it’s not only other gangbangers they target. They have no regard for regular civilian life—and it’s gotten to the point where they have no regard for the police out there anymore.
Over the years, a lot of people have lost respect for the police because of the way police deal with them. Who wants to be walking down the street, minding their own business, and the police pull up and grab them and throw them up against the car? You have the right to walk down the street and not be bothered just because the police pull up, especially in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, which is where you’re going to see a lot of this happen.
Why should I harass some people for standing on the corner? Now I’m just making you mad at the police. Now I’m making you ready to do something. So, if I see a group standing on the corner, there are different ways to come up to them. For example, I might pull up and say, “Yo, listen, fellas, you know that there’s this lady somewhere on this block and she’s watching this corner. And, you know, as soon as we pull off, she’s going to call the police saying that you guys are standing here. But if you go in your backyard, you can sit there and sit and talk all night. You can drink all night. Unless you all get loud, we won’t know about it.”
Instead, the police pull up and automatically think you’re a gang member, and you may not be a gang member. Once the police actually start treating people with respect, then some of the respect, if not all of the respect, will come back to the police. Because, as things stand, the police disrespect pretty much everybody.
I always wanted to be a cop, from the time I first saw Dick Tracy on TV as a 5- or 6-year-old. When I first started on the force, it was very exciting and I didn’t have any regrets. But, as I progressed in years on the police department, I could see things really starting to make subtle, then more drastic, changes. One of the drawbacks was that the city stopped hiring as many police officers. Now there’s a shortage of police officers. I don’t care what the new superintendent says. He’s trying, in my opinion, to do more with less people, and you can ask other police officers that are actually out in the field and they will agree with me. With a shortage of police officers, you’re putting the regular beat officers in more danger. And you’re shortchanging the citizens of Chicago because you don’t have the adequate patrols that are necessary in order to stop crime.
But the police need to actually get out there and do their job a bit different than they do. One thing my partners and I did was, when I worked the 6th District* and when I worked the 22nd District,* was that we patrolled our beat—constantly. You never could tell where on our beat we would pop up, but we were always there. If they wanted to give out a job on our beat, we would answer up on the radio and say, “We’re here on the beat; we’ll take that,” because we were there. We got to know the kids on the beat. We got to know the parents on the beat. We went to the beat meetings. By being in and out of the alleys, up and down different streets at any given time, it makes it harder for perpetrators to do something, because you never know when we were going to pop up. But if you have an approach that you take your job assignment and then you go someplace else where you meet up for coffee, or meet up with your buddies or you do whatever else is on your agenda, and you’re not on your beat, then people get used to the fact that, “I never see the police.”
Unfortunately, the only time I see the police in my own South Side neighborhood is if something happens. But by then, it’s too late. Prior police administrations, under Jody Weis and some of the other superintendents, what they wanted to do was they wanted to have the gang unit. They wanted to have the mobile strike force. They wanted to have a gun task force and any of these other units swoop into an area, let’s say like Englewood, after a shooting occurs. That’s a reaction. That’s not pro-action.
And, unfortunately, you have a lot of police officers that come on this job just so they can have the opportunity to go into minority communities and assert themselves as supposedly superior. I’ve seen Caucasian officers fight black males only when they have handcuffs on them. I had one Caucasian officer that got dispatched to the 7th District with me, and the first thing out of his mouth was: “I can’t wait till I get into a shootout.” We hadn’t been in the district for two or three days, and he couldn’t wait to get into a fight. Unfortunately, less than a year later, he got shot.
Most of the gun violence now is done by kids under the age of 25. They get involved at a much younger age. The gangs seek them out—and, in a lot of respects, they seek the gangs out as a means of belonging to something. Sometimes it’s environmental: “I’m hanging out with Jim over here. And if Jim is a member of a gang, and a rival gang member comes by and shoots at Jim, he is going to shoot at me, too. It’s guilt by association. So, I might as well join this gang so I have some type of way of being protected.”
Another reason could be the fact that the work ethic is a whole lot different now than it used to be. If we look back at history, black people came up here from the South, and they were some of the most impoverished immigrants of all. But they still survived. They still made it, and they tried to do everything they could to make sure that their families made it—get an education, work hard. Even when I was little, the thing I wanted most to do was to get a job and be able to make my own money—honest money. Nowadays, these kids see the gangbangers and the dope dealers riding around in these nice cars, and they don’t think about the fact that this guy’s retirement plan doesn’t go past a certain age. They see the glamour in it, and that’s what they want. So what do they do? They go out and they start slinging drugs. They start gangbanging.
But a lot of people consider the Chicago Police to be a gang. And the truth is that you’re going to always have some gang members or former gang members that are on the police department. Some join because they quit the gang and they want to try and stop other people from joining the gang. But some gangs actually encourage their members to join the police department. They want you to go to school. They want you to get into a high-ranking position on the force. Even if they don’t exploit you, now they have an “in,” so that other gang members can join.
I do know some police officers that were gang members, and some of them actually became very good cops because they knew the ins and outs of the particular gangs they patrolled around. One of the best ways to catch a dope dealer is to get somebody that used to be a dope dealer to tell you how this guy operates.
Now, the negative aspect of the police department having gang members is ‘cause now you don’t know who to trust. You don’t know who to talk to. You don’t know what high-ranking members are either current or former gang members. So you don’t know who has your back out there on the streets. For instance, you could go into a situation where there’s a man with a gun, and you jump out of the car, and it’s a gang member, and you don’t know if your partner is a member of that gang. You draw down and get ready to take this guy out and your partner might pop you. And that is very scary. But just being a police officer is scary.
These younger gangbangers are quick to pick up a gun and they’re more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. I can remember one instance where there was a shooting on 75th at about Evans, and, after my partner and I arrived, a gangbanger drove down Cottage Grove and opened up with a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol towards the police. Fortunately, nobody was injured. The police all ran to their cars in order to chase this idiot that was driving down the street. Unfortunately, he got away from us, but police are the type of persons that, instead of running from gunfire, they run to it.
But I don’t believe tighter gun-control legislation would help. For instance, there’s a law that states that a guy that has been convicted of a felony cannot own a gun. But you have convicted felons that keep getting guns. Now, if you cannot buy a gun, how are you getting a gun? Somebody else is either buying the guns for you or you’re stealing the guns. My opinion is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And when you take guns out of the hands of the citizens that need them to protect their own selves, then what you’re doing is outfitting the criminal element to take advantage of the citizen.
In order to stop the violence, there needs to be more funding for the police. And until the police and the community and the school system all get together and decide we’re going to work together to provide programs, to try and provide jobs and to provide ways for these students to have some hope for the future, we will never get anywhere.
Someone once asked me if I would be a cop again. My answer to that question would be, “No way in the world, because you’re going to have more police officers getting shot and more police officers getting killed.” Right before I retired in 2010, you had three police officers get killed. One police officer was leaving his father’s house to get on his new motorcycle and some gangbangers—who didn’t even live on the South Side of Chicago— wanted to relieve him of his motorcycle. And they killed the young man over there on King Drive—right off of 84th or 85th and King Drive.
Another black police officer got shot wiping his car off in front of his house. He bought the car, a Buick, as a retirement present to himself and was going to retire a month later and got shot in an apparent stickup. Last night, I talked to one of my friends that’s a police officer in the 22nd District now, where I was a police officer at one time. He told me a police officer got shot last night. Did it make the news? I watched the 6 o’clock news and it wasn’t on there. You know, there are so many instances where police officers get assaulted, get shot at or get shot that never make the news. So no, not in the city of Chicago.
