The healing potential of crack cocaine has been vastly underestimated by medical science, my friend insists.
“It should be studied,” he says. “If I had AIDS or something terminal, I’d smoke it, you can count on that.”
Take this one crack addict my friend knows, for instance. He says the guy has terrible gangrene and doesn’t take medication for it. The guy should have lost his leg a long time ago, but the infection just doesn’t seem to have spread much.
“It’s the crack,” my friend insists.
Then there’s the older crack addicts he sees every day, the homeless or near-homeless ones who’ve had full-blown AIDS for a decade or more, but stopped taking medication a long time ago, if they ever took it to begin with.
“It’s amazing how they just keep going,” he says. “I’m telling you, it’s the crack.”
A couple years ago, when he first told me these stories, his attitude seemed callous to me. Not anymore. I now understand that it is the survival mechanism that keeps him going when so many like him who’ve prowled the worst of Charlotte’s streets have moved on, given up or burned out. He can’t allow himself to get attached to those he drives to detox again and again as they go about the business of slowly dispatching themselves from this world. He can only manage them. If he let his guard down, they might stab him in the leg with a dirty needle after a particularly bad binge — or worse. But then, it wouldn’t be the first needle to the leg my friend has taken during a scuffle.
My friend is a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer. To appreciate his value to this community, you have to understand what our politically correct leaders have had such difficulty grasping — that should the bum with the gangrene crawl off into the woods and die, this officer might be the only person on this earth to note his disappearance from it and to wonder what happened to the guy. And, knowing this tough-talking officer the way I do, he’ll probably be the only person beating the bushes looking for the guy for months afterward.
You see, one doesn’t acquire an in-depth knowledge of the restorative properties of crack cocaine without going out of one’s way to get to know those addicted to it. And this, I must emphasize, is not a part of his job description.
But this column isn’t about one cop. It’s about so many — not all — but so many on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police force just like him who I just as easily could have written about in the space above. It’s about an officer who, without me asking him to, has sat in his patrol car in a vacant lot on my street many nights since a violent felon I recently wrote about, and likely ticked off, was released from prison.
It is about the officers in our department who could rival building inspectors with the knowledge of building and housing code they’ve obtained in their quest to rid fragile neighborhoods of problem landlords and tenants. It is about an officer I once watched hold up what could have been an open-and-shut complaint investigation to keep a stalker who had been terrifying a woman in a low-income neighborhood in custody another 24 hours. When his call to warrants produced an opinion that there was nothing to book the guy on, he refused to give up, combing legal sources for obscure language, then calling to lobby for a warrant he eventually got.
Again, none of this is in these officers’ job descriptions, but so many of them do these things anyway.
The city’s public relations department once put out a blanket memo warning cops that they are not to talk to members of the media — i.e., me — after a series of stories I once reported that caused discomfort to the city’s leadership.
Nothing changed. The ones who really care still risk disciplinary action to call me anyway, usually to ask if covering this story or that one might help shut down a prostitution house staffed by young women brought illegally to this country, bust up a drug house, or help them find someone they’re looking for. Our conversations always start out with “Don’t print my name, but is there anything you could write about. . .”
You rarely find the kind of cops I’m talking about in upper-management in Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s department. Innovators and self-starters who give a damn about those in the neighborhoods they patrol — particularly when those neighborhoods are low-income — tend to advance very slowly in our police department, one of the many factors contributing to the high-turnover rate among officers. Our department has become a popular recruiting ground for other North Carolina and South Carolina cities who lure away so many of our good cops.
That the good ones have somewhere to go has been a consolation to me every year when I sit, fists clenched, though another city council budget meeting where cops have to show up in person to embarrass the council into giving them a raise they deserve. Or when funding for a rose garden and similar inconsequential things is more important than honoring pay incentive promises city and police leaders made to cops who followed through on their part of the deal. Or when the voices of advocacy for our officers most notably missing are those of the department’s upper management.
But this column isn’t about them, or about just any officer on our streets. It’s about the ones I described above, the dozens like them I’ve encountered covering the department, those I’ve yet to meet and those I never will. If you’re still reading, you know who you are, and you know what you’re owed by this community that you haven’t gotten.
A sincere thank you.*
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2001.
