The lines were drawn in Birmingham in 1963.
Black children marched for civil rights. And police officers - grown white men - stood against them. With dogs. And batons. And Eugene "Bull" Connor's tank.
It was more complicated than that, of course, but the images of marches and beatings and brutality spread across the world with one stark message: Police, in Birmingham, represented something other than justice.
For 50 years now, Birmingham police have tried to change that image, to prove they are better than that. Police officials who followed Connor say that moment in history changed the way officers are hired and fired, affected how the department views brutality and demonstrations, and how it fights crime.
Birmingham's police have come a long way since 1963. But not long enough to forget the lessons.
"The challenge for us is the fact that we still police under the shadow of the movement,'' said current Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. "History has a way of coloring the present. The police department was so brutal and heartless that the images still remain."
Those images long defined Birmingham and its police department, as did the man behind them: Theophilus Eugene L. "Bull" Connor. Commissioner of Public Safety for the City of Birmingham from 1937 to 1952 and from 1956 to 1962, Connor was a heavy-handed segregationist. When he turned fire hoses and attack dogs on non-violent marchers, he became a symbol of Birmingham's resistance to change.
Eventually, pressure from Washington and the NAACP forced the all-white Birmingham Police Department to integrate. On March 30, 1966, Leroy Stover became the first black police officer for the City of Birmingham. Johnnie Johnson, then 24, followed the very next day.
"There was a lot of pressure on. Integrating the police department, that was a big thing,'' Johnson said. Johnson had worked as a volunteer civil defense officer, patrolling places in the city that were vulnerable to racist attacks. "Like schools at night, when people were throwing bombs and stuff,'' he said. "Anything we thought the Klan or anybody else might be interested in messing with."
When the police department started a reserve officer program in 1965, Johnson signed up for the class. After Johnson attended for several nights, the deputy chief asked him if he was interested in joining the force full time. "It was exciting for me. There was some apprehension because it was a new thing, but exciting because it was different,'' Johnson said. "I never thought of it as a trailblazing thing. This was a job I had that was better paying than the job I had. That's where my head was."
The department was made up of about 200-300 white officers at the time. It was clear that Johnson and Stover, and later Robert Boswell, weren't welcome. "We would come into roll call and they (the white officers) wouldn't stand on the wall with us,'' Johnson said. "They would move."
If there were any threats made against him, or the other black officers, they weren't made aware of it. "I had been on a year or so before I was referred to as a nigger,'' Johnson said. Police officers were filing on a bus to take them to Legion Field for an Auburn-Alabama game. Johnson and Stover walked onto the bus together and one of the officers said, "Well, here come the niggers."
Johnson said there were several officers that would speak to the black officers. "There was a guy named Harry Jones. I always liked Harry, because regardless of where I was or where he was, or who we were with, he was going to speak to us and that was big,'' he said.
Johnson said he felt that in a way, he and Stover were protected because, "A lot of the officers thought we were brought in by the NAACP,'' he said. "There was a lot of corruption then, but we were not exposed to it. They couldn't trust me, and I made it clear they couldn't trust me."
Progress took baby steps. In 1971, Johnson became the first black sergeant and was assigned to community relations. "Our job was to make the police department look good, whether they were doing right or not,'' Johnson said.
The next year, Jim Parsons took over the chief's job, a position he would hold for six years. In 1978, Bill Myers was named police chief. "He was the one who really went out into the community,'' Johnson said.
Still, the belief that the police department worked with Klansmen in the '50s and'60s and failed to properly investigate bombings simmered, particularly in the black community, for years. It had not yet faded by the late 1970s, when an unarmed black woman named Bonita Carter was shot dead by a white policeman in Kingston on June 22, 1979.
Carter, just 20 years old, was two blocks from the home she shared with her parents when she was shot by Officer George Sands, who was responding to an altercation at Jerry's Convenience Store. Sands mistakenly thought Carter was involved in a robbery there, but she only was with a man who had been arguing with the store clerk.
Her death was seen as yet another example of rampant police brutality against Birmingham's black citizens, and it reignited the racial strife that had never been far from the surface. Then-Mayor David Vann supported Sands' actions and credited the Carter shooting to "bold and aggressive" police training and firearms regulations. Already, Sands had received at least six complaints of excessive force against him. Vann's support for his officer once again launched mass, and sometimes violent, demonstrations in the city.
Vann's refusal to fire Sands cost him re-election to a second term as mayor as he fell in defeat to Richard Arrington Jr., a city councilman and longtime anti-police brutality advocate who would become the city's first African-American mayor.
"I recall the Bonita Carter shooting and still have family members who live in that immediate area,'' Roper said. "Her death was a tragedy, not only for her family but the entire city. I actually drive by the street sign bearing her name quite often. "
"That incident,'' he said, "was a watershed moment for this department and the City of Birmingham."
Sheriff Mike Hale agreed. The Carter shooting mandated a revision of the use of force for all law enforcement. "Not only does it still exist, it is stronger than ever,'' Hale said. "I will say with confidence that just about every law enforcement agency has a specific policy covering use of force. Within that policy would be documentation and a chain of command review anytime there is a use of force event, even in the course of a simple arrest."
Enter Arthur Deutcsh
Arrington made it his prime directive to reform the police department. There was a push for Arrington to promote from within, but that wasn't his choice. He favored Acting Chief Jack Warren, but Warren wasn't eligible to become a permanent chief because he was not on the Jefferson County Personnel Board's list of potential police chiefs.
Under pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police, and other groups, to make a decision, Arrington brought in brusque New Yorker Arthur Deutcsh as chief to revise the shooting policy and clamp down on abuse. And while Deutcsh was abrasive, he did just that. Over time, Birmingham's department worked hard to overcome its reputation, and struggled to regain the people's trust.
"The policies he implemented really established the foundation for this department, and many are still beneficial,'' Roper said. "In the 1980s, BPD became the first nationally-accredited department in this state, and I'm proud to say we're still only one of nine."
Inside the department, Deutcsh brought pomp and circumstance, such as promotions ceremonies, because that's the way it was done in New York, Johnson said. Under Deutcsh, but at Arrington's prompting, more black officers were promoted. In 1981, Johnson, Stover and John Fisher, the only black sergeants in the department, were promoted to the rank of lieutenant. "Things had moved, but it was slow,'' Johnson said. "With Arrington, things began to move more swiftly."
In 1987, the department pulled all of its dogs off the street, and had them retrained. "The dogs had been trained wrong,'' Johnson said. "The criminals wound up with bites in their legs. We stopped that. Once you stopped running, the dog would sit there and watch you. We had a dog in Linn Park that people could pet."
Deutcsh's tenure wasn't without scandal. Far from it. Deutcsh was accused in 1990 of tampering with arrest records of Arrington's daughter. He was convicted in 1991 and sentenced to one year in jail. However, Deutcsh never served jail time because in January 1992 a state appeals court reversed the conviction.
There ended up being no retrial in his misdemeanor case after a state judge found him incompetent to stand trial in 1995. Deutcsh's lawyers said his brain was injured after he fell down 20 City Hall steps in 1992 and that he could not assist in his defense for another trial.
By the time Deutcsh stepped down as police chief in 1991 Johnson was already a deputy chief. He was in Philadelphia when he got word.
"I made it my business to be back (in Birmingham) so that when the mayor walked into his office, he was going to be looking in my face,'' Johnson said. "He asked me would I be interested."
Of course, Johnson was interested. After spending the next year as acting chief, he became Birmingham's first black police chief. The black community was ecstatic. "Anywhere I went, people stopped me,'' Johnson said. "I had a lot of pull with the public. They knew me."
"When I became chief,'' he said, "I started walking the neighborhoods. We walked every public housing community in Birmingham. One day we had eight neighborhoods covered by every captain."
Johnson held anti-violence marches, and crime-free weekends. He lifted the police veil of secrecy by inviting the media, on a regular basis, to attend monthly staff meetings with the top brass. It was a stark contrast to Deutcsh, who rarely talked to the press and forbade his officers to do so.
"The people needed to know what was going on in the police department,'' Johnson said. "I think we pulled together, or attempted to pull together, a true vision of police community relations."
Johnson also started a police choir, and assigned ambassadors to community projects, such as fundraising for the United Way. "We needed to be seen as everyday people instead of as the Untouchables."
Yes, things were changing, but along with the good came the bad. Crime, particularly homicides, soared. Homicides reached an all-time high in 1991, when 141 people were murdered. Though the numbers began to steadily fall after that, Arrington took notice of the crime rate, as did a group of Birmingham business leaders who formed a foundation that eventually brought in outside police consultants to help find the police department's trouble spots and offer recommendations to fix them.
When the evaluation was finished, First Security Consulting Inc., led by former New York City Police commissioner William Bratton, issued a blistering report, saying there was a lack of coherent crime-fighting focus and a demoralized police force. A massive overhaul was needed, they said.
Arrington set a goal of a 15-percent reduction in crime by the end of 1997. When the department failed to meet that goal, Johnson was out as chief. The hiring of police chief wasn't all about race, or even gender. Johnson was replaced with a white officer named Mike Coppage, who was promoted from within and served five years as the city's top cop. When he left in 2003, Annetta Nunn took the job as Birmingham's first female chief.
Nunn remained chief until 2007, when Mayor Larry Langford took office and said he wanted sweeping change in the department of 800-plus police officers to bring renewed integrity to the force.
"Clearly change had to be made,'' said John Sloan, the chair of the UAB Department of Justice Sciences and a longtime observer of the Birmingham Police Department. "We had now done three hires from within, and they didn't seem to work out as best as they might have. Maybe it was time to go outside."
That's exactly what Langford did when he named Roper as chief. Roper, then 44, had been with the Hoover Police Department for almost 19 years and was a colonel in the Army Reserve. He has since been appointed a brigadier general. At the time of his hire, he had 23 years of experience in law enforcement, and 25 years in the military.
"He, perhaps more so than any of the others, had an additional set of credentials and credibility which said this was maybe going to be a different kind of hire,'' Sloan said. "As it turned out, it has been a different kind of hire, in my opinion."
Sloan said Roper is an evidence-based kind of administrator. "He knows his research,'' Sloan said. Roper studies the law enforcement landscape, and looks to successes in other cities and other departments to help develop tactical, organizational or operational initiatives for Birmingham.
"He wants maximum results in a reasonable period of time without sacrificing the relationship with the community, which to him is the No. 1 most important thing to maintain,'' Sloan said. "What he is doing is a very good job of juggling these potentially competing interests." Sloan said Roper has made good appointments from within the department. Officers promoted under his tenure have bought into his style, and have stepped up everything from crime-fighting operations to the department's technology capabilities.
"There is probably the greatest degree of consensus about Chief Roper's ability to do this job than perhaps there's ever been in the 25 years that I have been in Birmingham,'' Sloan said. "It's amazing. He really is a leader in the sense that he's inviting everyone to come along with him on this this interesting journey and they're buying into it. That's a leader."
Overall crime in Birmingham has been on a downward trend, even though some categories have fluctuated, as is expected. During Roper's tenure, the murder rate has declined each year until 2012. There were 93 homicides in 2007, 88 in 2008, 71 in 2009, 62 in 2010, 57 in 2011 and then 72 in 2012. The uptick in slayings last year was somewhat expected especially after the year started with five homicides in one incident.
One of the strategies Roper and his officers have implemented is responding quickly with specialized operations when they see a particular category of crime spike. Among the operations carried out in recent years are Operation Guardian, Operation Falcon, Operation Take-Back, Operation All-Hands, Operation Sticky Fingers, Operation Hit-Back, Operation Protect and Operation Zero Tolerance.
Chief Roper born in 1963
There is something fitting about Roper being at the helm of the police department as the city recognizes the 50th anniversary of the events of 1963. He was born in Birmingham in 1963.
"Being born in Birmingham in 1963, my family and I witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly as we lived in different areas of town,'' Roper said. "Interesting enough, at some point in my life, I've lived in all four of our police precincts: north, south, east and west."
Roper was raised by his grandmother, who lived through the struggle and shared her stories with Roper regarding challenges with voting even after national laws were changed. "I remember her telling a story of a poll worker asking her how many buttons were on her blouse. She looked down and counted and then looked at his shirt and responded 'the same number on your shirt.' Of course, the worker did not want to look down and start counting his buttons, so she didn't get to vote that day."
Roper graduated from J.H. Phillips High School in 1981. He was 17, and wrote three goals in a memory book which he still has at home: He wanted to be a police officer, join the Army and marry a beautiful woman who understood him. "By the grace of God, he has blessed me to accomplish all three of those goals,'' he said. "Internally there was something about making a difference in the community and our nation that propelled me in this direction."
Roper said when he began his police career, he knew he had a love and passion for the career, but never really thought about being the chief. "So much has to fall in place and one of those is people have to give you an opportunity,'' he said. "No one makes it totally on their own, but I have had good people who have supported me through the years. "
He said he also has had great leaders that have mentored him and given him opportunities through promotions to serve at the next highest level. "I try to pay that forward by mentoring others and using my life story when I speak with young people,'' he said. "My story is simple and that is don't allow your circumstance to determine your future and you can be anything you want to be, but it begins with making good decisions."
One thing that stands out in Roper's mind is a conversation he had with the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he visited Birmingham. "I recall him saying, 'Chief, you and your officers are the ones Martin and I talked about while sitting in the hotel rooms in Birmingham. We would dream and say one day a black man will be in charge of this department; one day there will be black officers working there.' Those days have come through the hard work, dedication and sacrifice of so many people who refused to take no for an answer. We're standing on their shoulders, and should always remember that as we serve our communities."
Sloan struggled to describe the progress in the public's acceptance of the law enforcement today, compared to those dark days of long ago. "There isn't an adjective or adverb that can really describe how far we've come,'' he said. "It's phenomenal."