How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey Read Free Book Online Page A

patrolled
around. One of the best ways to catch a dope dealer is to get
somebody that used to be a dope dealer to tell you how this guy
operates.
    Now, the negative aspect of the police
department having gang members is ‘cause now you don’t know who to
trust. You don’t know who to talk to. You don’t know what
high-ranking members are either current or former gang members. So
you don’t know who has your back out there on the streets. For
instance, you could go into a situation where there’s a man with a
gun, and you jump out of the car, and it’s a gang member, and you
don’t know if your partner is a member of that gang. You draw down
and get ready to take this guy out and your partner might pop you.
And that is very scary. But just being a police officer is
scary.
    These younger gangbangers are quick to pick
up a gun and they’re
more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. I can remember one
instance where there was a shooting on 75th at about Evans, and,
after my partner and I arrived, a gangbanger drove down Cottage
Grove and opened up
with a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol towards the police. Fortunately,
nobody was injured. The police all ran to their cars in order to
chase this idiot that was driving down the street. Unfortunately,
he got away from us, but police are the type of persons that,
instead of running from gunfire, they run to it.
    But I don’t believe tighter gun-control
legislation would help. For instance, there’s a law that states
that a guy that has been convicted of a felony cannot own a gun.
But you have convicted felons that keep getting guns. Now, if you
cannot buy a gun, how are you getting a gun? Somebody else is
either buying the guns for you or you’re stealing the guns. My
opinion is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And
when you take guns out of the hands of the citizens that need them
to protect their own selves, then what you’re doing is outfitting
the criminal element to take advantage of the citizen.
    In order to stop the violence, there needs to
be more funding for the police. And until the police and the
community and the school system all get together and decide we’re
going to work together to provide programs, to try and provide jobs
and to provide ways for these students to have some hope for the
future, we will never get anywhere.
    Someone once asked me if I would be a cop
again. My answer to that question would be, “No way in the world,
because you’re going to have more police officers getting shot and
more police officers getting killed.”
    Right before I retired in 2010, you had three
police officers get killed. One police officer was leaving his
father’s house to get on his new motorcycle and some
gangbangers—who didn’t even live on the South Side of
Chicago—wanted to relieve him of his motorcycle. And they killed
the young man over there on King Drive—right off of 84th or 85th
and King Drive.
    Another black police officer got shot wiping
his car off in front of his house. He bought the car, a Buick, as a
retirement present to himself and was going to retire a month later
and got shot in an apparent stickup. Last night, I talked to one of
my friends that’s a police officer in the 22nd District now, where
I was a police officer at one time. He told me a police officer got
shot last night. Did it make the news? I watched the 6 o’clock news
and it wasn’t on there. You know, there are so many instances where
police officers get assaulted, get shot at or get shot that never
make the news. So no, not in the city of Chicago.
    — Interviewed by Adrienne
Moss

Endnotes
    5 Fran Spielman, “Police Shortage a Growing
Problem,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 29, 2009.
    6 Quoted in Fran Spielman, “Hiring 500 Cops
in 2013 Not Enough, Aldermen Say,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 10,
2012.
    7 Garry F. McCarthy has been the police
superintendent since 2011. He was
formerly the police director in Newark, New Jersey.
    8 The 6th District covers the