Whole of the Law: The Dark Side of “Possibility City”

 

Officer Mike Cheeseman has retained the standard flat top Marine Corps haircut he received when he signed on as an ammo tech in the armed services for four years, much of which he spent in Afghanistan. He’s cherubic and clean cut in every aspect, from his smooth, ruddy cheeks to his freshly spiffed LMPD uniform. It’s early March, one of the warmest nights of the year so far, but the cops of the 2nd Division have yet to switch over to short sleeves. Despite the job’s pressures, not a bead of sweat can be detected on the rookie’s forehead. 

 

On the radio, a female dispatcher says in a velvet sandpaper voice, “The door is what?”

 

She’s talking to a cop on another run, a break-in somewhere east of Cheeseman, who is doubling back in that direction on Broadway from Southwestern Parkway, where he just finished cruising Chickasaw Park for teenagers in heat.

 

“The door is insecure,” the radio crackles. It’s the cop answering the dispatcher’s call about the possible break-in. 

 

“Insecure, buddy?” Cheeseman asks the radio. “The door is un-secure. What? Does the door also suffer from low self-esteem?” Then Cheeseman adds a lisp to the end of his words. “Does this dress make me look fat?”

 

Cheeseman is like that, fresh enough to maintain his sense of duty in this graceless era, yet smart enough to understand the necessity of a cultivated sense of gallows humor. He thinks and sometimes even talks about the best friend he got to know in Afghanistan who introduced him to MINOR THREAT and other punk-rock irritants, a friend who has been out of touch since he returned from battle. He worries about his friend as he patrols a treacherous wasteland much closer to home. When the city fathers dubbed Louisville, “Possibility City,” they did not have in mind the amalgam of heinous scenarios our young patrolman deals with nightly.  

 

Thirty-two of the 74 criminal homicides of 2008 were North of Algonquin Parkway and west of Ninth Street. 2009 saw a slight decrease by two bodies, but most murders were still concentrated in the West End. The consensus among narcotics detectives, homicide police and patrolmen is that, conservatively, 80 percent of the killings, including domestics, involve drugs. During most arguments that result in homicide, narcotics are the cause of, and often the fuel behind, the killing. 

 

Every year, the murder rate stays similar. Sometimes there is a fluke where the homicide count shoots through the roof or decreases exponentially. This only happens every five years or so. As of August, 2010, however, the city was at the lowest number of homicides since the city/county merger.

 

Community policing has helped deter violent crime. The department has implemented tools such as the 574-LMPD anonymous crime tip hotline, a venue that has received national attention, allowing people to report crime without fear of retaliation. There have been over 600 arrests due to reports called into the hotline, including apprehensions in 18 homicide cases.

 

Boston, Massachusetts, the setting for such crime epics as “Mystic River” and “The Departed” – which featured a ridiculous body count – had 60 murders in 2008, 14 less than Louisville. 

 

These facts glare back at Cheeseman as he drives slowly on Dell Park, passing a black, rusted Crown Victoria with two black males, parked in front of a house he was called to weeks ago on a domestic. An angry boyfriend, a known drug trafficker with a history of domestic violence, threw an air conditioner at his girlfriend in her own living room. In response, she threw a butcher knife, which barely grazed the man’s forearm. Because he was the one with a visible wound, Cheeseman begrudgingly had to take the girl to jail. 

 

The young officer curses Kentucky’s overly simplistic, loophole-ridden domestic violence laws as he parks in an alley and waits to see if the two in the Crown Vic are showing up for payback on the girl. When the car leaves, Cheeseman radios his beat partner, a stout, shovel-jawed veteran of Iraq named Mathew Mount who has two years on the force. Cheeseman pulls the two men over for having no license plate, approaching the window just as Mount parks across the street just in front of the overpass, his cruiser facing the direction from which the suspects came. It turns out the skinny driver with the corn rows and his sweaty and rotund partner were dropping off the abusive boyfriend at the girl’s house. They swear he was invited and since there is no EPO, Cheeseman and the two other cops who showed up for backup can’t do anything. They let the two men, both of whom have drug and assault charges on their record, go since they have a dealer’s plate in their back seat and promise to tape it to the back windshield as soon as possible. 

 

Driving back toward Broadway, Cheeseman feels slightly defeated. He utilizes his notebook, perhaps considering himself a member of a rogue gang squad who still keep intel on players and their connections, sharing information with cops in other divisions, an important practice many police feel is now lacking since the Gang Squad was disbanded. Just as he is beginning to write the night off as one of many lost battles, he gets a “shots fired” call. He remembers the address; a week ago, there was a drive-by on the same house. The target was a teenage gang banger who lived with his single mother. According to word on the street, the Blood member had robbed and, in the process, shot a rival gang member in the knee cap, absconding with a few thousand dollars and a copious amount of cocaine. 

 

Cheeseman hits the lights and speeds south toward 39th and Garland, hoping to redeem the evening. 

 

Spending about twenty minutes in an alley off Garland, Cheeseman waits for the shooter to return. It seems to be a tradition for the shooter to pass once, fire in the air, and return a short while later to shoot at the actual house. The logic of this escapes police. All they can come up with is, perhaps, the gang thinks the target will wander around outside after the first shots fired, gazing down the street, dumbfounded. Mount agrees to stay near the crime scene and Cheeseman heads back toward Broadway. As soon as he hits the main street, he gets a cell phone call from Mount. A car has turned onto 39th Street and is going extremely slow. 

 

Cheeseman pulls a U-turn, heading back toward Garland. He’s halfway there when Mount radios and says that he just saw a gun peeked out of the black Honda’s driver’s side window. Cheeseman crosses Garland, jumps the curb of a church yard, pointing his car hood toward the now parked Honda with tinted windows. Mount is halfway out of his unit, his Glock leveled on the Honda, slowly steering his car forward with one hand on the wheel and one foot on the pedal. The Honda jumps forward as Cheeseman, in one fell swoop, exits his patrol car, draws down and joins Mount in screaming for the driver to stop and exit the vehicle slowly with his hands up. From the north, another police car blocks 39th Street. Peabody, a young but slightly more seasoned black-haired cop, appears in the flood of red, blue and white lights and begins walking stoically toward the suspect’s vehicle. The target’s mother, a stout black woman with long, flaxen hair, approaches Peabody, pointing at the Honda, ordering the police to, “Kill that motherfucker!”

 

Mount and Cheeseman order the woman to get away from the car.

 

As she backpedals, she says, “Faggot motherfucker. I hope his mama dies!”

 

Peabody opens the driver’s door and grabs the big-boned driver, so fat, the officer is barely able to pull him out from between the seat and steering wheel. 

 

The other police lower their guns and join Peabody in cuffing the suspect. 

 

Inside the car, they find a Glock knockoff and several discarded shells. 

 

“What’s your name?” Peabody asks the handcuffed shooter wearing a U of L jersey. Their Sergeant, during questioning, will later discover that the angry young man is only 22 years old. 

 

“His name’s ‘arrested,’” Cheeseman says.

 

*

 

 

During the city and county merger of Louisville police departments, many units were disbanded, including the gang unit, a hub of modern organized crime intelligence. Travelling from division to division, each is unique unto itself, varying in the most critical forms of crime. The brass’s alternative to the utilization of many of the single sovereign units, such as those that dealt with gangs, was to divert more resources and officers to the FLEX platoons inside of each division – small detective units that work at the discretion of each division’s major. These police work on everything from auto theft to gang problems, which are connected to a high amount of the narcotics trafficking in the River City. Each division’s major decides which police are sent to their respective platoon. In turn, there are weekly meetings between the chief and the leaders of each division who are held accountable for the crime rates in the areas they are responsible for making safer. 

 

The escalating gang and drug problem the LMPD must face daily is not getting any better; hard drugs are now an epidemic with over 200 of 2009’s suspicious deaths being overdoses. More ODs in the river city than ever are now being attributed to heroin. Joe Whitaker, a counselor at the Healing Place, a homeless shelter and drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic in Louisville, says, “Four years ago, three out of ten people I encountered in recovery were using heroin. Now it’s more like six.”

 

There is a cork board on the wall at the detox unit at Whitaker’s workplace with pictures of every man that came through detox, started using again and ended up dying. It’s called The Death Board. Since Whitaker first moved to town from Baltimore, Maryland, clean and sober less than a year, there have been 26 additions to The Death Board. 

 

Drug addiction is an extremely private thing. It’s like an extra-marital love affair or a stigma-ridden fetish that could get a person fired or publicly ostracized. 

 

Chris, a scholar on the detriments of disrespect, would look kind of like a younger Mr. Clean if he dressed well and didn’t wink a lot. He has been trying to achieve long-term sobriety for a decade, a year being the longest amount of continuous clean time he has been able to put together. When one of his fellow recovering addicts caught him walking away from a drug deal, Chris asked his old friend not to tell anyone, that it was “none of their business,” referring to the sacred, private nature of addiction. 

 

Growing up on Chicago’s West Side, Chris was 12 years old when he started using drugs – marijuana at first and then, soon after, pharmaceuticals. His addiction continued progressing viciously and rapidly for the next four years.

 

“LSD was 14,” Chris says. “Cocaine was 15. And heroin was 16.”

 

It is reported that two-thirds of all drug addicts were abused physically or sexually during childhood. Though Chris does not blame his choices on anyone but himself, he believes that environment could have contributed to his addiction.

 

“When you’re surrounded by it,” Chris says. “When the economy of the neighborhood you live in is rooted in drugs and you see a criminal lifestyle with a certain air of glamour, it’s hard not to be influenced. Some of those drug dealers are getting hot girlfriends. There’s a counter culture kind of thing going on too.”

 

He has been clean and sober for nearly six months and almost breaks down when speaking of his ex-girlfriend and the three children she mothered, his babies. He has little contact with the kids and prays twice a day that a relationship will one day develop void of custody hearings and accusations.

 

Currently, Chris lives in a halfway house, his rent exchanged for janitorial work at the church that provides shelter for the addicts and alcoholics. He has completed more than half of his recovery program and spends most of his free time helping others who suffer from the same affliction – either on the phone or in person – giving them support and walking with them through countless dark nights of recovery. 

 

After describing the several bottoms his disease brought him to – admitting to twice using drugs with pregnant women – he goes on to list the fellow addicts who have died, while he somehow survived years of flagrant crack and heroin abuse. Without too much thought he is able to think of a dozen and then, surprised, one who is still alive – a former best friend who sometimes allowed Chris to sleep on his couch, a guy named Grant.

 

Grant, who himself still struggles with sobriety, is 35. He used to be emaciated to the point where a passerby would assume malnutrition. He would sweat profusely, an attribute which gained him the nickname “Stain” for the pit stains under his arms. After two straight years of muling drugs for about every dealer from the West End to Shively, pocketing ten bucks a run – money that went straight into his arm – he decided to give Methadone another try; the last time he stayed clean for any significant amount of time – two and a half years – began with a methadone clinic in Jeffersonville. 

 

Grant has a college degree and once owned a nice home in a nice neighborhood with a nice car in the driveway. Now, a renter in a severely more dangerous, less prosperous neighborhood, he has only recently begun working again and just purchased a beat-up pickup truck. According to greasy-haired Grant, the number of cocaine and heroin dealers in the Highlands area has tripled over the last three years. A lot of his own business included running eight balls and even ounces from Portland to Bardstown Road and Baxter Avenue. 

 

Grant did not check himself into rehab nor did he join any 12-step program. His wife, still in active addiction, supports his decision to quit. He first tried the Methadone program when he was 20 years old, taking a number before planting himself in the fluorescently lit, white-on-white waiting room. The number would stay the same, attached like a cancer to his name in their files. The number was less than 500, meaning he was one of the first 1,000 people to visit the clinic. When he returned less than a month ago to try and get clean again with their help, the women behind the front desk were shocked when they looked up his number, asking him how much of the last 15 years he’d been using. He said about two-thirds. 

 

The gray-haired black woman behind the desk, her face lit by the white screen of the computer said, “Honey, I’m sooo sorry.”

 

The last drug deal Grant was a part of involved delivering a large amount of both crack and cocaine to the heir of a Louisville dynasty. Hours later, after dropping off the narcotics, Grant answered a phone call in which the heir, weeping, admitted to not having eaten or even left his apartment in a week. Grant, the drug mule with a heart, brought the addict a burger and fries from Wendy’s and gave him some phone numbers of people who could help him get clean. 

 

Grant, still kicked, remains remorseful of the worry and pain he has put his family through.

 

“I used to blame anyone I could for my addiction,” Grant tells fellow recovering addicts. “My parents. My exes. My childhood. The selfishness of man. This shithole of a world we live in.”

 

This tortured soul, his arms swollen, still often sweating profusely, battling a hard bout with Hepatitis C which he will have to treat with interferon if he wants to survive it, now only blames Grant. 

 

“I haven’t used in weeks,” Grant continues. “And every week it gets easier to score dope. There are like six dealers I know of in a three block radius of my house and since I work in Portland and the South End, I can also find it without much headache during the daytime. I have no idea how I’m still clean.” 

 

*

 

 

One of the dealers Grant did quite a bit of work for before getting clean has himself made an Olympic effort to get out of the life. 

 

Raymond C., a dark-skinned Hispanic with raven black hair - always immaculately combed - and dressed like a Gucci model with a build to match, is trying to become a legitimate businessman. With a better undergraduate education than most of Louisville’s reporters and artists, Raymond also holds two masters degrees, one of which he attained overseas in Paris, focusing in business. He does not carry a gun nor does anyone who works for him. He drives a different car every time he is seen, often with an entourage of beautiful women in short skirts, none of whom surpass the age of 25. Now, only every so often doing a “favor” for a friend, he appears to be a law abiding citizen and speaks freely to those he trusts of his time as a drug kingpin: “The profit margin in cocaine beats just about any industry you can find. The stuff costs a penny to make. You spend a penny and you make at least sixty bucks. If we legalized it, we could solve the city’s deficit.”

 

“None of my family, nor any of their friends use drugs,” Raymond says. “We have family and tradition and that brings a certain amount of happiness and a sense of duty that is rarely found among Americans nowadays. There is an emptiness in so many people, people who often come from broken homes and live with broken hearts and they believe it can only be filled by something like cocaine, heroin or even a legalized drug like alcohol. People are simply TOO disconnected from one another and their communities.”

 

After twirling the keys to his latest foreign sports car, on the phone with someone out there in the madness begging Raymond to help them out - saying no one else will answer, maybe even crying and talking about how they’re going to get sick and lose their job if they don’t get a fix - he pockets his iPhone and heads out the door and into the garage of his multi-hundred-thousand-dollar home in a nice suburb. He is in no rush. Being late to a deal is a psychological trick on the part of the dealer, making sure the buyer knows his place. “God and drug dealers - they both always make you wait too long,” he says to himself.

 

*

 

 

The purple blue sky has darkened, the colors translucent over the concrete jungle, clouds of black pollution from the factories west somehow blending listlessly into the bittersweet panorama. As Michael Cheeseman patrols the northern reaches of the district and waits for drive-by shooters to attack their target for the second time that evening, Officer Leland Asbury passes the Park Hill Housing Projects. Asbury is a veteran of several foreign wars, including Kosovo and Iraq. He got accepted into the police academy in his forties and still ranked extremely high in fitness exams. His coal black hair and high cheekbones make him resemble a younger Ray Liotta, except with kinder eyes. 

 

The only person who has waved to Asbury all day is a one legged, elderly black gentleman sitting in his wheelchair behind the rusting project fences, a long time Park Hill resident and alcoholic who, as Asbury states, has had “one hell of a hard life.” 

 

He always waves. 

 

In the parking lots between the brown flagstone barrack-like buildings, pre-teens and adolescents gather under telephone wires from which shoes hang by rain-soaked strings - a sign that tells junkies the corner in question is open for business. These particular kids have learned the thousand-yard stare and sometimes even spit at Asbury’s car.

 

After checking out the industrial section of the West End, passing an abandoned warehouse on 12th and Zane, a place he has heard labeled “The Sex Party,” where Louisville’s elite - politicians and business owners alike - gather to enjoy smoke machines, theme rooms and God knows what else. Since it is a privately owned building, police can’t do much. But several of Asbury's fellow officers who have been called there - for noise complaints and even smoke alarms going off - swore that they’ve seen Limousines and women in lingerie through the open doors. 

 

At the Walgreens on Dixie, Asbury is called to the scene of what may be a drug overdose. Asbury's beat partner, Officer Marchejion, a short yet muscular blonde, her hair shoulder length, yells at the girl in the passenger seat of a heavily dented red Ford. The driver, an emaciated 20-something in a white tank top, is passed out, her eyes rolling into the back of her head. 

 

“Don’t lie to me,” Marchejion says. 

 

The passenger, an even younger woman, extremely beautiful, long auburn hair cascading down her chest, says that all they’ve been doing is drinking, that her friend must have alcohol poisoning. The EMTs arrive and put the passed-out woman - her skin whiter than a ghost - on a stretcher and take her into the back of their van to flush her system. 

 

“I thought she was dead,” the WalGreens security guard, an off duty corrections officer, says.

 

A female EMT tells Asbury that the woman is going to be okay, that she puked plentifully all over the inside of their van and that it was definitely a lot more than alcohol that caused her condition. Asbury and Marchejion discover not just rusted spoons and needles in the car, but bottles of benzos in the passenger’s purse. While the partners conduct their search, the girl, who now knows she is going to jail, pulls her hair back into a pony tail to reveal nothing but a red bra under her unzipped hoodie. The male officers, watching to make sure she does not abscond, catch a glance at her bosom then look away as not to compromise their position of authority. 

 

As the passenger is placed in the back of Marchejion’s patrol car, the female officer says, “You’re friend could’ve died. And it would’ve been on your conscience. You hid the drug use from us to save your own ass. And you’re still under arrest.”

 

When Asbury returns to his patrol car, the purple hue of the sunset behind him, he thinks of his daughters and says something close to prayer that neither of them will ever be in any situation close to this degenerate. 

 

Later that night, around the same time Cheeseman and Mount almost have to shoot someone, Marchejion calls Asbury's cell and informs him that her prisoner, the girl in the bra and hoodie, shoved a bag of heroin into the back seat to avoid it being discovered when she got searched inside the jail. 

 

“Tampering with evidence,” Asbury says. “One more charge.”

 

The partners are ecstatic.

 

*

 

 

It’s a new record.

 

Perhaps it is because of luck, perhaps because of good preventative police work like the drive-by Cheeseman, Mount and Peabody stopped. 

 

Whatever the reason, there has not been a homicide in the metro area in almost four weeks, a nice respite after the nine murders the squad is still catching up on from January, six of them occurring in one week.

 

“It’s not for lack of trying,” says a petite female uniformed officer in the elevator on the way to the second floor.  

 

“They’re just bad shots,” Lieutenant Wilkerson says. “The shootings haven’t stopped. You hear about that guy the other day, gets shot six times, three in the hands, three in the legs? I’m thinking, where was this idiot aiming for? Thank God the doctors have gotten better at keeping these people alive.”

 

The gallows humor exhibited by Patrol Officer Cheeseman has been honed and refined by cops who reach homicide. 

 

Barry Wilkerson of LMPD’s Homicide Unit is distinguished from his fellow detectives in his swagger and his choice of side arm, a Sig Sauer rather than the current department issue Glock, evidence of the decade which he was hired as well as his experience in S.W.A.T. 

 

Wilkerson admits that his desire for becoming a police officer goes back to childhood and recognizes the glamorous allure of the job. As he went through St. X High School and the University of Louisville, he directed his studies toward an end in police work, particularly the investigative kind. 

 

“It took me quite a few years to get in,” he says. “It’s very competitive, but it’s what I wanted. There’s a lot of freedom. You’re outdoors. Even though you have a beat, there’s a freedom to move around and a freedom to make decisions. It’s also very challenging. I thought you could just ‘can’ domestic situations when I first started. But each case has a different dynamic.”

 

Wilkerson has been in every unit a cop can join in the department, with the exception of narcotics, including a week stint in Internal Affairs. His graying hair rises less than a half inch from his scalp, a style that makes Officer Cheeseman’s look bedraggled, bohemian even.

 

Wilkerson’s eyes are sad, watery and honest as he explains that our city averages 70 homicides a year. He wears a dark blue shirt and a tie of the same color, khaki trousers and black, non-descript loafers. He is disgruntled at how statistics can be misleading: “You know, they say there’s lies, there’s damn lies and then there’s statistics. I’ve had probably a hundred subpoenas in the last year. I’ve gone to court one time. A lot of time prosecutors won’t need us. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m not needed. I have to go to one building, punch in, go to court, wait and go back to the first building and punch out - time I could be spending working murders. The one time I did go, we got a conviction. So, if you want to write that story, you can turn around and write that I have a 100 percent conviction rate OR that I didn’t attend court 99 percent of the time.”

 

This is how statistics can be manipulated to make a story, especially in law enforcement, look good or bad.

 

The increase in drug killings and overdoses that began last summer with an influx of the purest heroin to hit the streets of Louisville, perhaps, ever - a dosage too potent for what users in the River City had grown accustomed to - has caused homicide police like Wilkerson to begin funneling all information related to said deaths through Metro Narcotics so that those detectives can backtrack and perhaps unveil the sources that supplied these late addicts with the heroin that killed them, tracing the dealers through friends, associates and middlemen close to the decedents. 

 

This heroin is so pure, there have been more than one instance of two ODs who died within seconds of the needle’s plunger going down, falling on top of one another, at first confusing detectives fresh on the scene who could not tell if they were looking at a murder or not. 

 

“What’s the odds of having two people OD at the same time?” Wilkerson wonders. “We had another case where liquid cocaine was involved and just jacked their hearts up too much. I won’t say that it was a bad batch. They just weren’t used to it.”

 

He speaks of pro-activity, of how the body they had to stand over is obviously beyond saving, but that they could perhaps prevent the perpetrator who made a profit off this poor bastard’s habit from selling any more product that was most likely not advertised as bad or overly pure.

 

While the majority of the Lieutenant’s background lies in tactical work and administrative duties, he has always been drawn to the investigative aspect of police work. His furlough with property crimes, while a bit mundane, prepared him for the backtracking and paperwork that comes with being a homicide detective. The difference between investigating property and investigating human beings is that, “the homicide cases are so dynamic.”

 

For the first time since he planted himself in the swivel chair behind his polished oak desk, Wilkerson’s eyes turn from resigned detachment to utter wonderment. 

 

“You’ll walk into one thing and think, ‘Oh we’ll solve this. This is easy.’ Then you’ll turn around and find it’s extremely difficult. Some of them, at first, we’re confounded. Then we put it down in a day. There’s little rhyme or reason.”

 

Wilkerson is the only police in his family other than a cousin. He is glad now, looking back, that it took him until his late 20s to be admitted into the academy: “If I’d gotten on when I was 21, I think the maturity factor would’ve caused some issues because there’s a lot of power in being a police officer and a lot of required discretion. I was 27 when I got on. I was married. I had the life experience to know when I went into a domestic what it’s like to be married. Some of the younger kids who come on don’t have that to fall back on. How do you understand the stresses of a marriage and family life and money problems if you’re in your early twenties? In this day and age, it’s uncommon for people that age to have had those experiences.”

 

Within the last year, heroin has come back with a vengeance. Over the last year, around 15 overdoses have been reported, all of which Homicide must investigate - the unit is responsible for all suspicious deaths from motor vehicle accidents to suicides to assaults where the victim is in critical condition and might not pull through. 

 

The 15 deaths mentioned above only account for heroin overdoses in which an autopsy was performed. If the person is old enough and the death appears natural - in the sense that the decedent did not die soon after shooting dope - post mortem examinations are often curtailed in favor of more prudent cases like murders or mysterious deaths. 

 

Collectively, between heroin, crack, methamphetamine, cocaine and benzodiazepines, accidental overdoses account for between 175 and 200 of the average 300 suspicious deaths Homicide investigates every year. 

 

The correlation between drugs and homicide and the attendant callous attitude among those who exist within or even on the periphery of the world of black market narcotics is so strong and acute, consider the following anecdote.

 

While investigating a drug murder, one of the seven homicides in one week in January, a suspect and or possible witness, when told by Detective Chris Middleton, “We need to talk to you about a murder,” he lackadaisically replied, “Which one?”

 

*

 

 

A prominent businessman and once powerful political figure in Louisville condescendingly said to a potential campaign donor, a smug smile on his face, “You ever notice how people who have been poor for a long time ... they look so broken down they almost appear to be another species.” There may be some truth to this, being that the stress that comes with abject poverty is enough to place premature laugh lines and crows feet on anyone’s face, digging a sag in the shoulders of even the strongest man with impeccable genes. 

 

But the possible inherent truth in his statement, delivered with nauseating ignorance and naiveté in his tone, makes it even more essential for all of us to remember that the addicted and the afflicted - those who, like Chris and Grant, live in the darkness on the edge of town - are human beings who deserve the same compassion, understanding, consideration and regard that we normally hoard selfishly for ourselves and the social circles in which we operate. These people have aspirations and hopes. They suffer loss and grapple with their demons. And, like us, they have precious memories, as few as they may be, that they cherish in their mind’s eye like religious iconography. Memories that, like the hollow-point bullets fired daily in neighborhoods like Park Hill, they use to battle the hard times that knock more frequently, as the world turns less and less graceful and the economy nears its eminent collapse. 

 

This plea to you, dear reader, for more consideration and respect, also applies to the police who work and dream in these neighborhoods and who often, contrary to popular belief, care deeply for both the taxpayers and the criminals on their beats.