In August of 1982, a summer of tension between Roanoke police and black citizens boiled over when an off-duty officer shot a black shoplifter.
The Roanoke NAACP accused police of using excessive force and called for a federal investigation that eventually cleared the department.
But to some, the perception of a police force insensitive to the black community was reinforced by a simple, black-and-white statistic: Only eight of the city’s 224 police officers were black.
Eight years later, little has changed.
The Roanoke Police Department is again facing allegations that its officers use too much force in dealing with black citizens, and the U.S. Justice Department is reviewing NAACP complaints.
And eight years later, there still are only eight black officers on the now 244-member force.
No other major city in Virginia has as few black officers as Roanoke.
Blacks sharpened their criticism of Roanoke’s department last month, shortly after a William Fleming High School coach and counselor claimed that police beat him and called him “nigger” during an arrest. The Roanoke NAACP decried what it called a pattern of excessive force used by police in dealing with blacks over the past eight months.
Whether the complaints are founded is a question that may not be answered until after months of investigation, discussion between police and black community leaders, a possible federal mediation effort, and study of race relations by a city task force.
But the allegations point to a larger and more pressing question: What is the relationship between Roanoke blacks and the police department?
To Police Chief M. David Hooper – who says he knows of no pattern of excessive force but welcomes a federal inquiry – the relationship is “a good one.”
Evangeline Jeffrey, president of Roanoke’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, believes the mood is “extremely tense.”
Black citizens are concerned about more than just allegations of excessive force. Many have become disillusioned by what they perceive as an aloof, out-of-touch police department that has always been nearly all-white, Jeffrey and other blacks say.
More minorities on the force would send a message to the black community that police are responsive to their needs, Jeffrey said.
“It seems that blacks are not welcome,” she said. “If you see more blacks [on the force], that in itself gives you a little more assurance that you are going to be responded to in a kindly manner.”
Hooper isn’t sure that’s the case.
“Maybe so,” he said. “Since I have never felt that way, I can’t tell you why someone feels the way they do.”
`Rollers up’
To some young residents of Roanoke’s most crime-ridden black neighborhoods, the city’s blue-and-white police cars are known as “rollers.”
When police arrive, one 18-year-old at the Lincoln Terrace housing project said, a warning goes out. “They say `Rollers up’ ” and the crowd scatters, he said.
Marcia Gunn, a 37-year-old mother of two teen-agers, said that whenever there is a problem in the Hurt Park housing project, police roll into the neighborhood in waves.
In a recent weekend incident, there were five officers in one car. “It couldn’t have been no police downtown,” Gunn said. “They were all up here.”
Once an arrest is made, she said, the police leave as quickly as they come.
Gunn wishes police would spend more time in the area – not in times of trouble, but just to get to know the residents and set a positive example for the children.
“They don’t talk to them any more,” she said. “We need it even more now – because of what’s out there with our kids.”
Jeffrey said she often hears people complain: “You don’t see a lot of police presence in the community unless there is a crisis.”
Connie Isbell, who raised four children in her 27 years at Lincoln Terrace, said she believes that police “think that every house in this area has to be dope-infested.” The kids who live in the project are unfairly labeled as criminals, she said.
Once she called the police department for help because she was afraid her adult son was going to get into a fight with “one of those druggies.”
“They asked me for my life history,” she said, and she gave them all sorts of details. Then “they said there was nothing they could do until something happened.”
Of a dozen people interviewed at Lincoln Terrace one night last week, two had praise for the Police Department.
“All I have to say, I think they’re doing a wonderful job,” one elderly woman said as she sat on her front porch.
A next-door neighbor said police “are doing all that they can. It’s just that a lot of people around here don’t have respect for them.”
The woman said, though, that she wished the police would have more foot patrols in the project.
The Rev. Charles Green, an NAACP advisory board member, said police don’t seem willing to go on foot patrols. Such patrols would give them a better chance to interact with citizens, he said.
“It used to be that police officers would smile at you, wave, and move on. But now, whenever you see them, they’re always chasing somebody.”
Part of the problem, Jeffrey believes, is that the department is run in a “military style” that often overlooks the importance of community relations.
“It can be a human problem, and we need to deal with it with a human approach,” she said.
Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney Donald Caldwell also believes that police should stress community relations more in their training.
Such emphasis would give police “periodic reminders that the 10 percent of the black citizens they deal with do not represent the entire black population,” Caldwell said. “They seldom come in contact with the 90 percent who are hard-working and law-abiding citizens.”
“You need to be reminded that when you roll in to a place like Hunt Avenue, not everyone there is a hood or a criminal,” he said. “Otherwise, you have a tendency to start thinking that way.”
Hooper says community relations are an important part of his department’s training and philosophy. Officers are encouraged to walk through housing projects, talk to residents in their districts and touch base with merchants regularly, he said. And recruits are taught a human-relations course in the police academy, he said.
As for the critics who say community relations in the department don’t exist, “I would say that the people who say that might very well not know what we do,” Hooper said.
“It does exist,” he said. “It’s been here all along.”
Hooper said his crime-prevention bureau of 12 officers makes regular public appearances, works with neighborhood watch groups, provides resource officers in city schools and teaches the DARE drug awareness program.
But police must balance their community relations efforts with the demands of an increasing workload. In the past year, Hooper said, calls for police officers increased from about 72,000 to 78,000.
Ruth Wilkinson, a nine-year police veteran who left the force in 1982 to take a supervisor’s job with the city Parks and Recreation Department, said the department did little to encourage officers to interact with citizens on a personal basis when she was on the force.
If officers wanted to get to know the people in their districts, she said, they did it on their own initiative and their own time.
Wilkinson said she used to kill spare time by parking her patrol car in a park in Northwest Roanoke, getting out and talking to the people.
She allowed young children to climb into the driver’s seat of her patrol car and flash the blue lights.
“But it wasn’t anything I would go back and tell my sergeant about,” she said. “I felt like I would have gotten in trouble for not patrolling my district.”
`Run roughshod’
John Ernest Canty is a prominent figure in Roanoke’s black community, and not just because of his 6-foot-2, 280 pound frame.
Canty, a dropout-prevention counselor who also coaches football and wrestling at William Fleming, is well known among students and older residents alike.
Three weeks ago, Canty claimed that at least six police officers beat him with billy sticks, sprayed him with Mace and called him “nigger” during an altercation at a Hardee’s on Hershberger Road.
Canty said he was trying to help two young girls charged with trespassing; police said he was interfering with their efforts and was charged with impeding police. The case is one of those cited by the NAACP in its request for a Justice Department investigation.
“I know Coach Canty myself,” said 18-year-old Tonya Taborn, a Patrick Henry High School graduate headed for Virginia State University. “He’s not the type of person who would be against the law. He’s always trying to keep people out of trouble.”
Taborn, who lives in a racially mixed area off Peters Creek Road, believes that police are often insensitive to young blacks.
Those concerns are not confined to the poorest parts of town, Jeffrey said.
“There have been instances where police have run roughshod over middle-class blacks who are considered to be solid and stable citizens,” she said. “When that happens, you’re starting to inflame an entirely different area.”
`Abuse day in, day out’
A couple of weeks before J.C. Clingenpeel retired from the Roanoke Police Department last fall, a shoplifter spat in his face. The judge gave the shoplifter 15 days in jail – 10 for the theft, and five for spitting on Clingenpeel.
“Police officers see so much and have to go through so much,” said Clingenpeel, who worked 18 years for the department as a patrol officer and detective.
“It’s hard to take the abuse day in and day out, year after year. Sometimes you say things to people that maybe you shouldn’t. But very, very seldom is it not deserved.”
Clingenpeel, who is white, doesn’t believe claims that Roanoke police officers use too much force with black citizens.
“It’s real easy for them to cry discrimination and police brutality when they’re not out there,” Clingenpeel said. But when young blacks are out shooting at each other, he said, “you don’t never see the NAACP doing anything about it.”
When police go into black neighborhoods, they face all sorts of abuse, he said. “I think the blacks have always discriminated against the whites. When you go in their neighborhood, you’re gonna get called an `m.f.’ ”
But, Jeffrey said, living with name-calling is part of police work. “I don’t want to put undue pressure on them, but if you profess to be a professional, you have to take what comes with the territory,” she said.
Some young blacks say police suspect them of drug dealing simply because of the color of their skin. But Clingenpeel doesn’t believe that police search blacks in high-crime areas without good reason.
Police don’t charge anybody “unless they have a case on him. If a person is frequenting a drug-dealing place, they may get caught up in it if there’s a shakedown. If they don’t want to get into that situation, they shouldn’t be there.”
Clingenpeel, who took early retirement in October, doesn’t believe the lack of black police officers in the city is the department’s fault. “The blacks, they need to be better educated. If they go get a better education, they can get a job if they want to work.”
Like Clingenpeel, many police officers are disheartened by the NAACP’s complaints – which is the only public recognition they have received recently during a time when drug-dealing and violence are growing.
And while some patrolmen are defensive, others are scared.
“A lot of people [in the black community] are carrying guns now,” said one officer, who asked that he not be identified. “It makes you want to keep an eye on their hands.
“Everybody just thinks it is a matter of time before one of those bullets hits one of us. If you don’t get scared, you not playing with a full deck.”
In the past five years, the officer said, there have been five shooting incidents involving city police. In all cases, the suspects were white.
“I would hate like hell to see what would have happened if the person the officer shot was black.”
The officer said suspects often try to use race as a rationale for the arrest.
” `You’re just charging me because I’m black,’ ” he quoted a suspect as saying. “They forget what they did to get arrested.”
Hooper also is concerned that some troublemakers will interpret the NAACP’s cause as their own.
“There are elements in the black community that are influenced substantially by publicity, by comments that are made – valid or invalid – and they act on those when a circumstance provides that opportunity.”
The first time that citizens began to complain about the department’s racial makeup, Hooper said, was after the issue was raised in June in newspaper stories about rock- and bottle-throwing incidents on 11th Street.
“It had not been reflected in our relationship with the black community routinely until the question got a great deal of attention in the past 60 days,” he said.
He characterized the two blacks who were quoted in the newspaper as raising the issue as “a rock thrower” and “an illegal alien.”
Avoiding the locker room
Not long after he joined the Roanoke Police Department in 1985, Curtis Campbell learned to avoid the locker room.
Campbell, one of the few blacks in the department, said the chances were too great that locker room banter would include a racial slur.
So every day before his shift, Campbell donned his uniform at home and drove in to work.
“I didn’t want to be in the locker room sitting on one side and hearing something on the other side that would offend me,” he said.
“You never know what you might hear, and it just would have led to trouble.”
When he joined the department, Campbell said, he had hoped that police officers would be above making racial slurs.
“I thought that in the police department there would be only one color – the blue of your uniform. But it’s just not like that,” he said.
Johnny Couch, a 15-year-veteran of the force, also said he was subjected to racial insensitivity before leaving the department two years ago.
Some officers referred to him as “boy,” Couch said. “They know that that offends blacks, and they still do it all the time.”
Such complaints by black officers “is not a common thing” in the department, Hooper said. “And usually when it does occur, it’s when an officer is in some hot water. A lot of times it’s used as an excuse.”
Hooper responded that Couch and Campbell left the department under pressure that resulted from disciplinary problems.
But even if there is no overt racism in the department, some black officers say they feel alienated by the sheer number of white faces around them.
“You should never have to go to work for a four-day period and never see any other black guys around,” said a former black police officer who asked that he not be named. “I worked too many days like that.”
And even the blacks who remained in the department had difficulty in moving up the ranks, according to Sterling Moorman, a black patrolman who worked 21 years before retiring in 1979.
“Blacks were not promoted, for what reason I don’t know,” he said. “It was coming from within the administration.”
Of the eight blacks on the force, one is a lieutenant and one is sergeant.
Moorman said he doesn’t believe Hooper would tolerate racism in his department. “He treated me like a man and a police officer.” But Moorman believes officers need to be taught how to relate better to black citizens.
“Maybe the officers don’t know how to talk to people in black neighborhoods,” Moorman said. “The officers I’ve seen patrolling are all white.”
Hooper conceded that some potential black officers may feel uncomfortable about joining a department that is 97 percent white.
But once black officers enter the police academy, Hooper said, they soon develop a “very strong relationship” with fellow recruits that transcends racial lines.
“Color is simply not a factor,” he said.
But things don’t work that way in the real world, argues Eugene Cheek, a former Roanoke prosecutor who is now a civil rights attorney in Richmond.
“You can’t just ignore 400 years of racism and oppression, and say: `OK, it doesn’t exist,’ ” Cheek said. “I wouldn’t say the chief is out-and-out prejudiced. I would say he’s just not conscious to the problem. He’s insensitive to it.”
It’s an internal bias produced by being around white people most of the time, Cheek said. “It’s not a conscious racism. It’s just there.”
`Bright light of publicity’
Although the NAACP held a news conference two weeks ago to air its concerns, Hooper thinks the issue could have been better handled out of public view.
The chief said recent news reports have “disturbed and dissettled” what he considers an otherwise untroubled relationship between the mostly white police and the residents of the black neighborhoods.
“I don’t think that resolutions and solutions always come from the bright light of publicity,” Hooper said.
Published allegations of police brutality make it harder on patrol officers, Hooper said. “The slightest little thing could be turned into another round of public exposure, public analysis, public scrutiny and public allegations,” he said.
“I think it has a very detrimental effect in that regard.”
Jeffrey – who has faced criticism from some blacks who feel the NAACP is too silent – said the decision to go public came only after police gave “no definitive response” to her concerns.
“As we always do, we tried to work with the establishment before bringing public attention to the problem,” she said.
Even though the allegations are now public, Jeffrey said it’s too soon to tell how receptive police will be in working for better relations during private meetings that began two weeks ago.
She’s concerned that once the Justice Department’s work is done, police may close their books on the case. That happened in 1982, she said, after the officer who shot the shoplifter was fired. And she believes it happens routinely when citizens file complaints with the department.
“People are saying that they don’t feel they’re getting a good response other than the usual: `Our officer responded in an appropriate manner.’
“People are just tired of that canned expression. It’s obvious that there’s a bigger problem, and it needs to be addressed, so just don’t come back and tell me that the matter has been taken care of.”
“It’s not the resolution of one case that will solve the overall problem. Because if that was all there was to it, we wouldn’t be here today; the problem would have been solved in 1982.”
Staff writer Ron Brown contributed information to this story.