Black and Blue - brutality by Prince Georges County, Maryland, police officers

Washington Monthly, June, 2001 by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why does American richest black suburb have some of the country's most brutal cops?

NO ONE HAD TO WARN PRINCE JONES about the police department in Prince George's County. The cops in Maryland's second most populous county had a reputation for turning routine traffic stops into Rodney King incidents sans video camera. Jones had told friends about his fear of the P.G. County police, and, according to them, Jones had even been pulled over and searched for drugs once before by a P.G. cop (who found none).

Jones' fear of police didn't match his profile. He was a Howard University student, a father, and a man of faith who never hesitated to dispense a religious aphorism to friends. He was also a fitness freak and personal trainer at Bally's Total Fitness. After leaving Howard, Jones became engaged to the mother of his child and planned to join the Navy. The son of a radiologist, he could have been a poster boy for middle-class black America.

So for the past few months, Jones' family and friends have been asking how he ended up slumped over the steering wheel of his Jeep Cherokee, a few blocks from his fiancee's home in Virginia, with four bullets in his back courtesy of a P.G. County police officer.

The official police account is that the shooting was a surveillance operation gone bad. In the early morning of Sept. 1, thinking they were trailing a suspect in a theft of an officer's gun, undercover narcotics detective Carlton Jones (unrelated) and a superior trailed Jones 15 miles from P.G. County, where he lived, through Washington, D.C., and finally into Fairfax, Va., where the two officers separated. Both officers were in plain clothes and unmarked cars. As Carlton Jones tells the story, Prince Jones, apparently discovering he was being followed, rammed the detective's car three times, forcing the officer to open fire in fear for his life.

But for those close to Prince Jones, the police account is simply ,an attempt to cover up a cold-blooded murder. Though it is within protocol for police to operate outside of their jurisdiction, a mistaken identity shooting is not. Neither is claiming to be a cop while raising a gun without a badge, which Carlton Jones did by his own admission. Perhaps most troubling is the profile of the suspect police claimed to be looking for--a stocky, 5-foot-6-inch man with dreadlocks. Jones was 6-foot-4inches and slender, sporting closely cropped hair.

In over 30 years as Commonwealth attorney for Fairfax County, Robert Horan had never charged a police officer with a crime. After investigating Jones' death, he declined to break with tradition. Jones' death, which is still under internal investigation by the Prince George's County Police Department, sparked a minor furor at Howard University. Students marched on the Justice Department to demand a federal investigation. The controversial shooting rang out nationally as Al Sharpton promised to lead a march on P.G. County. The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial asserting that "the ultimate wrong was done to an innocent man." Even presidential candidate Al Gore dedicated a moment of silence to Jones.

For those who'd followed the news in the county over the past few years, Jones' killing was only the latest in a string of suspicious shootings, murders, and beatings that had occurred at the hands of P.G. County police officers. Jones was the 12th person shot over a 14-month period in the county. Five of those 12 died. Two other men, who were not shot, died in police custody.

The violence perpetrated by the P.G. cops is a curious development. Usually, police brutality is framed as a racial issue: Rodney King suffering at the hands of a racist white Los Angeles Police Department or more recently, an unarmed Timothy Thomas, gunned down by a white Cincinnati cop. But in more and more communities, the police doing the brutalizing are African Americans, supervised by African-American police chiefs, and answerable to African-American mayors and city councils. In the case of P.G. County, the brutality is cast against the backdrop of black America's power base, the largest concentration of the black middle class in the country.

A bedroom community of the nation's capital, Prince George's county is the only suburban county ever to become richer as it became blacker. According to the Census Bureau, the county, which is 63 percent black, had a median income of $47,000 in 1997, more than double the median income for African Americans and almost $10,000 more than the median income for whims.

Beyond economics, P.G. County's African-American residents boast a formidable amount of political power. The county executive, the state's attorney, and the chairman of the county council are all black, as are 41 percent of the police officers, including the one who killed Prince Jones. With political and economic clout have come all the trappings of opulence once denied African Americans. And in some ways, Prince George's shows integration taken to its most extreme, perhaps perverted, end--black people with the inalienable right to drive the same luxury cars, buy the same sprawling houses, and be just as apathetic as America's white elite.