Calumet City Read Free Page B

eight hours of interviews at 111th and Cottage Grove, the Area 2 Detective Division, sometimes referred to as ADD by tired and shaken patrol officers who take issue with repeatedly answering the same question.
    Each interview is done separately, but the questions don’t change, nor do the dour expressions and sidebar conversations. First, it’s the Homicide dicks who already interviewed you at the scene; then one at a time, it’s the rest of them—OPS, the ASA (Chicago’s version of DA/district attorney), our Watch LT, and the street deputy backed by his entourage. They all want to know why you didn’t do it differently.
    I don’t complain because I understand why we’re doing this; people died, people with families and maybe even futures. Today, the intermissions are worse than the interrogations. I keep seeing the body in the wall and the hand in the tricolor water. And the manacle.
    After our Watch LT finishes the gunfight segment of his questions and his third sidebar with an assistant state’s attorney who wasn’t introduced, our Watch LT asks me again, "Why chase the perpetrators across the alley into the six-flat?"
    He’s been marching toward the conclusion that I abandoned my fellow officers to make the "hero move"—like he’d have an idea what that was. His name is Carson Scott,
Lieutenant
Carson Scott if you wish less shit to fall on you during your workday. Thankfully, I don’t see him often unless something awful like this happens. He’s an asshole—a racist and a weekend golfer who keeps his nose embedded in the rear seam of any plaid-pants that might get him lifted to captain or feather his ambitions for public office.
    "I was protecting my fellow officers by giving chase, by remaining connected to the shooters."
    He jots down my answer a third time. Privately, we call him "Kit" Carson and speculate that a ringmaster position in a wild west show would be the proper promotion.
    "And that’s why you abandoned wounded Officers Pike and Jackson?"
    "Abandoned?"
    "Please answer the question." He’s looking at the blank line where his pen will record the answer.
    I repeat the same explanation. He writes it down again, then checks it against the previous lines. His pen taps and he curls his lower lip under expensive teeth. Kit Carson has family money he didn’t earn and a law degree from DePaul on the Northside. If you don’t know the city, Chicago has a "north/south thing"—the city’s separated into two distinct tribal nations by a river engineered to flow backwards from Lake Michigan: the Southside says it works for a living, while the Northside pays five dollars for coffee and has maids to open their windows.
    Kit Carson says, "Hmmm…IAD may need to look at this."
    IAD is the Internal Affairs Division. There’s no way IAD needs to look at this, and won’t unless Kit Carson files a CR number (complaint register investigation) on me, a complaint that would have the same basis in fact as pudding would in the foundation of the Sears Tower. My mouth moves before I can cover it.
    "Gimme a break, Kit. Jesus."
    "What?" He two-hands the pen and leans toward me.
    "There’s no violation of policy. No ’abandonment.’ All I did was what we’re supposed to. You’d know that if you ever left your desk."
    Lieutenant Carson writes that down, taking time to recheck the grammar. "That will be all, Officer Black."
    But it isn’t. I can assure you that these interviews are why the police would rather not shoot anyone. And when the interviews are over you cap the twelve-hour, two-death day by dodging accusations from neighborhood politicians waiting outside with the cameras, then doing paperwork until your hands hurt.
    My day finally finishes because people like Kit Carson have other things to do and even the bad days end—an elemental truth sane cops learn early, along with no one’s solving shit out here. Little victories are all you get. Live inside those and you can still hope to make a