Nation/World

One shift: Officers patrol an anxious America

Policing in America today is a rib dinner paid for by a stranger, and a protester kicking a dent into your patrol car door. It's warning a young man speeding down a country road to beware of errant deer, and searching through trash cans for a gun on the streets of a big city.

It's your 8-year-old daughter calling repeatedly to ask if you're safe. It's your mother wishing you could wear plainclothes again. And it's a kiss and a goodbye that you promise won't be your last.

But it's also watching a video in your Facebook feed when another officer shoots a black man — a therapist, hands raised, trying to help a client who is autistic; a young man stopped for a traffic violation; a man selling CDs. And it's facing the protests that follow, which are prompting introspection and even more of an attitude of us-versus-them.

Adapting — it's that, too. Being a warrior one minute, on guard at all times, and minutes later answering the most banal questions: You know a good restaurant around here? How do I get to the highway?

About 477,000 sworn officers serve in the roughly 12,000 police departments in the United States. The demands, challenges, resources and cultures of each police force vary. But there are also commonalities.

With the exception of some cities still awash in violence, crime has dropped, and the job has changed. And after the fatal ambushes of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana — as well as years of intensifying protests about the deaths of black men, women and children at the hands of the police — officers everywhere are under pressure to change still more.

On the streets of every town and city, each shift is a search for safety. Here's a look at one such shift, compiled through ride-alongs last week with officers in 10 departments — big, small, rural, suburban — across the United States.

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Bullets and Beginnings

Officer Michael Virgilio's shift has just begun. He is already on high alert.

He slowly eases his vehicle out into the alley of a precinct in Seattle (population: 684,451), scanning left and right as the precinct's metal garage door trundles down behind him.

The brick alley has recessed alcoves that could conceal someone lying in wait, and the new safety protocol in his department says to take no chances, make no assumptions and avoid being predictable.

"One of the most vulnerable times in our day is shift change," Virgilio, 31, says as he checks the route. "It's a matter of avoiding certain patterns. Anybody who is trying to organize some sort of attack on police officers is going to do some sort of surveillance. They're going to figure out when our shift changes are, they are going to figure out what doors we use to get in and out of the precinct. And it doesn't take long to gather that type of intelligence."

Lt. Scott Finn begins all his shifts in Prince George's County, Maryland (population: 909,535), a densely packed suburb just outside Washington, D.C., by passing through a set of doors scarred by two bullet holes, each a round shock of silver, embedded in mundane tan paint.

A few months before the ambushes in Dallas and Baton Rouge, a man with a semi-automatic handgun opened fire outside the police station in Landover as officers were leaving roll call. With two of his brothers filming, police said, the man shot randomly at cars and an ambulance, while officers inside the station house returned fire.

A 28-year-old off-duty police detective, Jacai Colson — who, like the gunman, was black and dressed in street clothes — happened to pull up to the front of the station, on his way into work. A fellow officer mistook him for the assailant and shot him dead.

"It was just the fog of war," Finn says. "Everything had to align perfectly to have something like that happen."

The lieutenant pushes through the doors and walks to his unmarked patrol car, where he slips on his bulletproof vest, pressing the Velcro on its sides to make sure it is tightly secured. Another shift begins.

Calls Pending

The call came about an hour in: Shots fired. "We're going to go in kind of cautious," Officer Michael Walker of the Milwaukee Police Department says.

He's 39 and 6-foot-2, an imposing 10-year veteran of the force on patrol with an affable rookie named Nathan Smalkoski.

They speed through the North Side of Milwaukee (population: 600,155), parts of which have long wrestled with poverty, disinvestment and violence. It's over 90 degrees outside and it's busy.

The shift will send them to answer a call about the theft of a Lexus. A car wreck. Domestic dispute. School burglary alarm. One assignment after the next, without any breaks, not even for lunch, which amounted to a Brisk Lemonade from a 7-Eleven store.

"I'm going to have a heightened awareness of what's going on here," Walker says on his way to the shots-fired call. He parks a little farther away from some incidents now, to gauge the circumstances more carefully.

Six fresh bullet casings are scattered through an alley. A man on a bike says some people sped off in an old Honda.

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But the report of shots fired came not from a neighbor here, but from ShotSpotter technology, which captures the sounds of gunfire to determine where a shooting is taking place. A worker at a nearby school and many of the neighbors heard the shots but apparently did not call 911. Gunshots happen all the time, some said.

"Police! Anybody home?" Walker calls out, loudly knocking on one door.

"Hello ma'am, how are you?" he says to a woman who answers.

"Am I in trouble?" she says.

Walker explains to the elderly couple who live there that their house was hit with a bullet. He climbs to a packed storage room on their second floor and digs under old blankets, lamps, computers and mattresses to find the hole where the bullet came through their wall.

Outside, behind yellow police tape, Smalkoski is marking the shell casings. A resident walks up and begins videotaping the officer with his phone. "Everybody records everything," Smalkoski says.

Coffee, Criticism, Fear

In Park Forest, Illinois (population: 21,954), where an officer was shot and critically wounded in March, many residents are tying blue ribbons to trees or installing blue light bulbs on their porches to show support for the police.

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In Paulding County, Georgia (population 152,238), west of Atlanta, a family brought a sign to the sheriff's headquarters that now hangs in the squad room: "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called Children of God."

In the Connecticut countryside, children from a local camp have drawn pictures, sent cards and delivered a large poster to the police station, thanking officers for their service.

In many places, officers have been showered with gifts of food, Starbucks, cold drinks.

"Over the past five days, I've had more people offer to buy me a coffee than I can remember," says Sgt. Thomas Glynn, 46, during a patrol through Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But officers around the country are also confronting tension, and it's been building for years. Glynn's city is where, in 2009, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor who is black, was arrested for trying to break into his own home; the episode soured police relations with President Barack Obama, who said the Cambridge police had "acted stupidly." And in 2013, the fugitive Boston Marathon bombers murdered an MIT police officer.

Near Harvard Square, Glynn pulls up to a bus at a parking meter that has expired. Another officer had given the driver a ticket and told him to move the bus, but while backing up, the bus driver hit the officer's motorcycle.

The driver, whose first language was not English, grew agitated and shouted, "And you wonder why police officers kill people!"

Glynn says: "That was not what he meant to say. What he meant to say was, 'And you wonder why people kill police officers!'"

Dallas and Baton Rouge had made their way to the land of Harvard. The man's outburst, Glynn says, "had everything to do with what's happening now."

Finn points to his patrol car's door. "Like the dent?" he asks.

Just days earlier, he says, someone had kicked his car and yelled "Black Lives Matter" before taking off on a motorcycle.

It was, he says, part of a pattern of increased tension that he has noticed in Prince George's County ever since police officers shot and killed Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, on back-to-back days this month.

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Finn says he sees more pushback and hears more obscenities from residents now than ever before.

"I've never experienced that until just recently," he says, while driving through a stretch of the county studded with strip malls, just outside Washington. "At this point, I'm fortunate that it was a kick, and not a bullet. We can see that that's a strong possibility."

A dark night. A country road in Coventry, Connecticut (population: 12,438). A Dodge Durango races by, going around 20 mph over the speed limit. Sgt. Michael Hicks pulls out behind, following up and down a hill until he reaches a straightaway. The flashing lights go on, the Durango pulls over.

A young man with a shaved head sits in the driver's seat.

"I definitely notice that now more people I pull over, if they're black, they right away turn on the lights and put their hands on the wheel," Hicks says. "I like that. It makes me feel safe."

He flips on his body camera, gets out of his police SUV and goes through his routine. He puts two fingers on the black Durango's trunk, to make sure no one is inside — two cops were once killed when someone jumped out of a trunk, he explains. He flashes his light into the back seat, then the front, and approaches the driver with his holstered gun on a hip that he positions away from the car window.

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"We're trained for Armageddon," Hicks says back in the vehicle. "We're trained for the worst."

He returns to the driver, a Hispanic man with no previous traffic violations, and gives him a warning: "Slow down. You hit a deer going 63, and it won't be good."

The gangs of Compton, California (population 97,877) — the Crips and the Pirus, the Compton Varrio Tortilla Flats and others — hang out in places that are easy to defend: alleys, dead ends and a housing development with "one way in, one way out," where residents shout warnings to one another as soon as the police arrive.

"Gangsters like cul-de-sacs," says Deputy Sheriff Mizrain Orrego, 30, driving with his partner through Compton, the section of Los Angeles County (population: 10,170,292) made famous by violence and gangster rap. "They can jump the fence onto the street behind, and we can't follow in the car. Or they see us coming and toss the pistol over the fence. You ask for help, and everyone walks away and says nothing happened."

Orrego and his partner check one cul-de-sac after another. In most spots, men are hanging around outside, often drinking beer, but the officers have no cause to search them. They ask how they're doing — "You good?" — and then move on.

But as soon as the police cruiser turns one corner, a young man at the end of the block takes off running. He ducks into the shadows behind an abandoned house, and he's gone.

Deputy Samuel Aldama, 29, hits the gas. The cruiser flies to the end of the dead-end street, and in an instant both he and Orrego are out of their car, yelling at a group of young black men to put their hands in the air. Each deputy keeps a finger on his weapon, but the guns stay in their holsters.

The abandoned house has become a hangout for the South Side Compton Crips, and Orrego is convinced that there is a gun here — or, at least, that there was one.

"Every time you get three of these guys together, you know they have a gun somewhere," Orrego says.

Finding a gun is the primary challenge in the cat-and-mouse game that the officers have been playing all day, as part of a summer unit aimed at limiting gang activity. Their shift started at 9 a.m. It's 11 p.m.

The deputies have pulled 18 guns off the streets in the last nine weeks. But none this day.

'Black Lives Matter When the Police Kill Them'

The victim — a black man, perhaps in his 30s — lies uncovered on the sidewalk of the bus station's bay, his backpack askew on the pavement. His arm is curled toward his body, frozen a few inches off the ground.

In parts of Prince George's County, a mostly black area, where some people struggle more than others, this is routine. The call came in as a stabbing. Finn does not respond until he realizes that the victim has died. It is now a homicide.

A handful of officers manage the scene. Finn heads for dinner.

He says he prefers not to eat in the area he has been patrolling, where he might run into people he arrested or be reminded of where fellow officers were shot. So he drives south, to a Texas Ribs & BBQ in Clinton, Maryland. Talk turns to the Black Lives Matter protests.

"'Black Lives Matter When the Police Kill Them,'" Finn says, as if arguing with protesters. "Have that be your name."

Sometimes — especially since the recent shootings by police — black residents will say they were pulled over because of racial profiling, Orrego says.

"It's not true," he says, driving through Compton and past low-slung homes tagged with graffiti by competing gangs. "We're minorities as well."

The media don't tell the whole story, he says. "You don't know what goes on."

"We all have families to go home to," he says. "There's more to it than you think."

"The reality is that in Compton, in the west side, the reality is you will stop and contact more African-Americans," he says. "If you're on the east side, you'll contact more Hispanics."

"The reality is that people who steal cars are mostly Hispanics," he says. "The reason why is because more Hispanics who are involved in any criminal activity, they use methamphetamine. So now they need to support their habit. Where African-Americans, they don't do that for the most part. They don't consume methamphetamine.

"The reality is that African-Americans, at least in the city of Compton — and I'm talking from our training and experience — they commit more violent crimes, more shootings. There's more gang feuds among black-on-black."

The cruiser rolls slowly around a corner, his words on crime and race still hanging in the air.

Deputy Constable Steve W. Faulkner, 39, joins two other deputies at a taco truck and food trailer parked side by side in a strip-mall parking lot in Precinct 1 in Houston (population: 2,296,224). They are talking about guns, life, the job.

A few days ago, he says, after the attack in Dallas, he and other deputies responded to a call from a woman who had concerns about social-media messages her teenage daughter had been receiving.

The woman and her daughter were black. The deputies were white. The woman and her daughter were not pleased with the deputies after they suggested removing an app from her daughter's phone as a possible solution.

"The younger girl, she's probably about 13, she just piped up and said, 'You don't like black people. If this would have been a white girl, this would have been handled totally different,'" Faulkner recalls.

"That," he says, "is a direct result of everything going on right now."

Later in the shift, the dispatcher's voice fills the car: A group of men are waving a gun in front of a Washateria laundry. One is a Hispanic male in a black shirt and red pants, the other a black male in a white shirt and white shorts.

Faulkner speeds toward the scene, lights on and siren wailing.

As he turns into the Washateria parking lot, he sees a black man and three Hispanic men standing next to their cars. He gets out of his car. He is alone.

One of the Hispanic men wears a dark gray shirt and red shorts. The deputy pulls his gun and orders all four onto the ground. The men are not happy, though they do as they are told. He handcuffs two of them. He searches them and finds nothing. He uncuffs the two men.

He explains why he is there, and the tensions ease up. "Thanks for not shooting me," one of the men says, smiling as he holds his hands in the air.

Faulkner slides back into the driver's seat and turns to the four men. "Y'all have a good one," he says.

Officers John Buchanan and Robert Bramble are cruising through Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of Brooklyn's rapidly changing neighborhoods.

Buchanan, 24, is white. He grew up in suburban Suffolk County, on Long Island, where he still lives. He has two cousins who are police officers.

Bramble, 24, is black. He grew up in Brooklyn, in East Flatbush. He still lives in the city, about 15 minutes from the station house. His father was a New York City police officer.

It is hot, and as they drive along the streets of the 79th Precinct they notice a now-familiar sight: "It's SOS," Bramble says.

On the sidewalk, a small contingent from the group Save Our Streets is protesting — a woman with a bullhorn condemning violence and other people wearing T-shirts that say: "Stop shooting. Start living."

Bramble says the protests are now a part of life in Brooklyn (population: 2,636,735). "There are people in the law enforcement world that are hurt right now; there's civilians out there reading and seeing these things, and experiencing them, that hurt right now," he says. "It affects everybody."

Even with the tensions surrounding policing, Bramble does not feel defensive.

"I don't personally feel any animosity because I feel like I understand where the protesters I have encountered are coming from and what they're trying to achieve and establish," he says. "There may be protesters out there who have a more sinister agenda. I just, in my limited experience, have not encountered them yet."

Buchanan shifts the discussion to the importance of neighborhood policing.

"We can use that to try and change some people's perspectives, or at least be an example for what policing in a community should be," he says. Still, he thinks anyone who is not an officer cannot understand the pressures and risks of the job.

"You can't have a perspective on this job, in my opinion, unless you do it," he says. "Unless you're in policing, doing it every day as a career, you can't know what it's like."

Cpl. Jon Mannino in Park Forest, Illinois, remembers another example of how things have changed. Shortly after the fatal shooting of Castile by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop, an African-American driver that Mannino had pulled over seemed afraid.

"He said, 'I'm reaching for my wallet, don't shoot me,'" Mannino says. "And he wasn't being funny. He wasn't being sarcastic."

"What can you say?" the corporal says. "While it's not personally upsetting, it's upsetting that that's where we are right now as a country."

'Be Safe'

Faulkner's cellphone rings as he sits in his patrol vehicle outside the precinct office. It's a fellow Houston deputy. "Yeah, I'm fixin' to roll out," he tells the caller.

He is silent as he holds the phone to his ear, then quickly steps out of the vehicle and heads into the precinct. The deputy was calling to relay a concern. The wife of a lieutenant has been having trouble reaching her husband on his cellphone. She is worried.

Faulkner returns to the vehicle. He reports back: The lieutenant is in the precinct office. He's fine. He just left his cellphone inside while talking to a colleague outside. It took only those few minutes for the lieutenant's wife to start panicking.

Faulkner says this is how the job is lately. His own wife calls more often to check on him. He and his 10-year-old daughter have a ritual before he leaves the house: She stands at the front door and gives him a kiss on the forehead. Lately, though, she has started telling him, "Be safe" and "Be careful," phrases she had not used before the Dallas ambush.

"It changes the way you do patrolling," Faulkner says. "Your head's on a swivel now."

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