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24 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.15 fcer Yvette Gentry remembers responding to a robbery call early in her career at a fast-food restaurant near 39th and Market streets. A man sprinting in the opposite direction ft the suspect's description: black male, late 20s. Gentry yanked the steering wheel left, throwing the squad car into a sharp U-turn, and leapt from the vehicle. It was the mid-'90s, her second year on the job, and she hadn't yet learned the one- way streets and alleyways of her west Louisville beat. But Gentry, a former Central High School track runner, kept up with the suspect. It was about 1 a.m. as she cut through dimly lit backyards, hurdled a chain-link fence. "Ten I didn't see him anymore," Gentry says. "I didn't realize he had laid down. And when he got up, he had a gun." She drew her 9 mm Smith & Wesson. "Police!" she yelled. "Don't shoot! Drop your weapon!" Seconds ticked. He complied. On the ride to jail, Gentry said to the man, "Do you know how close we came to somebody not being in this damn car?" Recalling the memory, she says he was apologetic: "Man, I don't want to kill nobody. I wasn't going to shoot you." "Actually a nice guy when I got him in the car and talked to him," Gentry says. "Just a desperate guy trying to fgure out how he was going to feed his people tomorrow." merica's black police ofcers are largely absent from the discussion ignited by protests of controversial deaths: 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and 43-year-old Eric Garner in New York — all black, unarmed and killed by police. Several of Louisville's black cops who spoke to me for this column (many on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal) say they feel ostracized by the black community but bristle at racial slights from their "blue" brothers and sisters. All voice concern about the lack of minority representation in the police force, particularly in the high-profle units. "It's important for the police department to look like the community," says University of Louisville Police Major and Metro Councilman David James, whose Sixth District stretches across Old Louisville. Louisville's police force is much whiter than the population it serves. In a city that is nearly a quarter African- American, about 11 percent of LMPD's approximately 1,240 sworn ofcers are black. It gets whiter farther up the leadership ladder. Of the 231 police in the "commanding ofcer ranks" (sergeants, lieutenants, majors, etc.), 7 percent are black. James, a former Louisville narcotics detective who used to be head of the city's Fraternal Order of Police, remembers when he was walking home from Butler High School as a kid. He was still wearing his marching-band uniform when he says a white ofcer pulled up and, without warning, threw him on the hood of the police cruiser. "My motivation for becoming a police ofcer was because I hated police," James says. "I remember growing up watching the riots, the marches, the water hoses and the dogs. I saw police doing bad things to people like me. In my mind, I thought if I became a police ofcer I would be able to stop them from doing stuf like that to people who looked like me." Tat dual identity came into focus during an incident in the early 1990s, after the city and county drug units merged. James remembers while he was arresting a black suspect for allegedly dealing cocaine, a county ofcer, who was white, spouted of in front of several other ofcers and residents. "He says, 'Nigger, shut up' (to the suspect). And repeated, 'Hey, nigger, I said shut the fuck up.' It went through me like barbed wire," James says. "We get the handcufs on and get the guy in the car, and I said to the ofcer, 'I'm not sure how you all in the county do things, but that shit ain't cool. Don't ever do that again.'" lot of black ofcers are afraid to speak out," says one decorated veteran LMPD ofcer who works in the Second Division, which covers swaths of west Louisville. "I can see why we don't want to bring up a sore subject for white ofcers with what's going on right now. It is job suicide. Tey will mark you a radical. But it's time for us to stand up. If not, we're protecting a criminal with a badge." "I'm a supporter of the protestors," a black LMPD detective says when asked about "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" demonstrations in Louisville that have stopped trafc along Main Street and Bardstown and Shelbyville roads. Tose same activists have marched through St. Matthews Mall and, during Christmastime at Light Up Middletown, stood silently with signs quoting the dying words of police-shooting victims. "Tere has to be a change because there's something broken here," the detective says. "Tere's a history of abuse of the black community." Lt. Richard Pearson, a 22- year veteran who oversees the Second Division nightshift, says the protestors are "foolish." He adds that, over the years, black residents have given him an earful. "If I had a nickel for every time I've been called 'house nigger' or 'Uncle Tom' or 'sellout,' I'd be a rich, rich man," he says. "I keep asking them, 'As a young black male, do you want the entire police department to be white? Or do you want black ofcers, and if so, why would you bring them down?' You never get any support from our people, and it's a shame." Pearson also criticizes the fact that so few African-Americans have advanced under Chief Steve Conrad's LMPD. "Tere is not one black commanding ofcer in Metro Narcotics — not one," Pearson says. "I think in the entire Narcotics Division, there's only maybe two black ofcers" — there are three, out of 35 — "and I don't see how you can justify that, how you can rationalize a unit like that not having hardly any blacks in it and no black commanders." Te homicide unit also has no African-American commanders. (Last May, a jury ruled against Pearson in a lawsuit that claimed LMPD unfairly passed him over for promotions.) "Tey try to appease black ofcers by promoting us sparingly and then putting us where they want us — as opposed to where we deserve to be — so they Black and Blue O A "A bit e BAILEY the Will African-American underrepresentation on the city's police force ever be rectifed?