By Mansfield Frazier
On May 3, 1982 I was living in a mini mansion in Los Angeles right outside of Beverly Hills, a residence afforded me due to the various nefarious criminal activities I’d been engaged in for well over a decade by that time. As they say in street parlance … I was living “large.” Indeed, probably a bit too large.
While I normally “stayed in my lane” as a counterfeiter of credit cards — rarely branching out to other criminal activities — one of the women who worked on my crew using the bogus cards I manufactured knew someone, who knew someone, who was printing some excellent fifty and hundred dollar bills — indeed, the best fakes I’d ever laid eyes on. So, for $25,000 I bought $100,000 worth of the strombolies.
My crew and I had a diligent work ethic, and within three days we’d gotten rid of all of the fifties and virtually all of the hundreds. We started near Venice Beach in Santa Monica and drove east on Route 10, getting off at every exit … because at each exit a Mexican national was standing on the side of the road selling bags of oranges. They were accustomed to making fast cash transactions … lest the traffic would back up and people would begin honking their horns, so not one of them ever closely inspected the phonies we were passing.
By the time we got to San Bernardino the back seat of my Benz was filled with bags of oranges, and we still had a return trip to make, hitting all the exits on the other side of the freeway.
But one of the novices on the crew — and ex-stripper who gave me a sob story — couldn’t resist attempting to pass one of the fake bills at a liquor store and she got popped; and she immediately flipped.
I was sitting at my desk at 11 in the morning (my study had a great sight-line of the front door) when I heard it come crashing in. I had a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver rigged in a holster under my desk and, startled, I pulled it out so quickly the barrel of the gun was pointing towards the ceiling when a Secret Service agent leveled his .40 caliber automatic squarely at my forehead and said, in the most authoritative of voices, “Drop it Frazier, I mean it!” I immediately allowed the gun to slide out of my hand onto the floor.
The agent, a white dude in his mid 50s (who had five or six uniformed Los Angeles police officers backing him up), then calmly walked over to me, leaned over, and, with a smile playing at the corner of his lips, whispered in my ear, “This is your lucky day, you motherfucker … if these guys behind me had been in front of me like they wanted to be, and seen you with that gun in your hand, you’d be a dead man.”
All I could think was, “hush, truth,” but all I could mutter was a weak “thanks.” He didn’t have to, but he’d just spared my life.
My point is, as more than one veteran police officer has told me in private, most cops can go their entire career without even pulling their weapon, let alone firing it. But other cops look for every opportunity they can to bust a cap in someone’s ass.
There are some sick people out there; some pedophiles become priests or scoutmasters because of the cover it affords them to perpetrate their heinous crimes; and some serial killers become police officers for exactly the same reason. But when a cop kills again, again, again and again there is no mechanism by which to remove the clear and present danger to society. Instead, everyone in blue circles the wagons and the officer is allowed to retire with honors. It’s the culture that’s at fault.
Law enforcement officers have every right to go safely home to their families at the end of their shifts, but rare is the occasion they have to shoot or kill someone to do so. And the problem is, even when a cop is wrong, he knows that in the end he’s going to be right … that the shooting will be ruled justifiable, no matter the circumstances. That is, until now.
Certainly the streets can be dangerous … no one in their right mind would dispute that. But, just because, as police lawyer and chief apologist Pat D’Angelo said, “… the streets are crawling with serial offenders and other[s] engaged in criminal behavior,” doesn’t mean that out-of-control officers can become the judge, jury and executioner … and do so without question.
D’Angelo’s job is to get officers acquitted by any legal means, no matter the consequences, so it’s his job at this juncture to poison the jury pool by playing the ultimate race card: In essence he is saying, “You have to support these white officers, no matter how egregious their behavior, because they’re the only ones standing between you and that black horde that will rape your daughters and slit your wife’s throat as she sleeps.”
But the fact is, if Michael Brelo is found not guilty at trial Cleveland will suffer yet another huge black eye, and race relations (along with the region’s reputation) will be set back decades … simply to protect white privilege — the privilege to kill unarmed blacks.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.