As the country reckons with how to confront systemic racism and diversify police departments, the experiences of Black officers in Tampa show how the old ways remain entrenched.
Over the course of a generation, those efforts have barely made a dent.
“Every department has good officers — people who want to make change in their communities,” Freedman told BuzzFeed News. “But they are stymied at every turn by people who want to cut corners.” and told BuzzFeed News she recognized some of the Black officers’ frustrations. She declined to comment on the actions of previous administrations but promised a fresh start under her leadership and said the George Floyd protests had “changed the ball game” when it comes to responding to the needs of the community and officers’ mental health.
Wyche and other Black officers said they support O’Connor’s goals but are watching to see if she will be effective. Humiliated, Wyche asked the officer why. He remembers her saying, “It looked like you didn’t belong in your car.”Other people could sit on the sidelines and complain, he liked to say. Wyche wanted a seat at the table.
So he focused on “pretextual stops” — finding reasons to pull over cars driven by young Black men who might be connected to the crimes — and ignored older drivers or white people. Then he noticed the habit stuck when he worked in other neighborhoods.What he saw in Tampa’s lower-income communities were people who were overpoliced yet underprotected, living with the constant fear of shootings and robberies but reluctant to share information with officers they mistrusted.
Wyche knew what it was like to face a volatile situation with your finger on the trigger. In one bodycam video reviewed by BuzzFeed News, he points his gun as a fleeing man puts his hands behind his back — a movement that Wyche believed supervisors would interpret as reaching for a weapon. Wyche didn’t shoot. A second later, the man revealed his hands: empty.. But he also wanted to show the public his perspective that not all cops are so quick to use violence.
She started messaging Wyche on Snapchat. In screenshots of those messages she shared with BuzzFeed News, she sometimes ranted about police cases in the news, calling him a “Pig Cop.” Wyche recognized the legal system was “fucked up,” he conceded in his messages. Every day he put on the uniform knowing it was a symbol of oppression, he said, but he used that energy to motivate him.
He has no major discipline cases in his file and excelled at the agency’s metrics on proactive policing, evaluations show. In his first three years on the force, Toole investigated 1,235 “quality of life” complaints — minor infractions that can include noise, loitering, or public intoxication — and made arrests in 92% of them. He was assigned 2,547 calls for service but initiated 10,999 on his own.
After arriving at the Shell gas station, Wyche peeked his head into the car and saw three Black teenagers sitting quietly and looking scared.He later told investigators he heard Toole say, “they’re clean”— meaning there were no warrants in the teenagers’ names — “I’m trying to get consent to search.”
So she called Anderson, her boyfriend’s mother, and passed the phone to the officer. When he hung up and ordered everyone out of the car, she assumed Anderson had consented. Yet the investigators omitted Pegues’ and Anderson’s skepticism and summarized their interviews this way: “Both subjects recalled the Officer mentioning the smell of marijuana in the car as the reason for the search. During the interviews neither subject accused the Officers of any wrongdoing.”
Keith Taylor, a former New York Police Department detective sergeant who supervised SWAT and Internal Affairs units, reviewed the investigation for BuzzFeed News. He called the differing accounts of the interaction “a very clear red flag of an attempt to cover up behavior that is not compliant with the agency’s policies.”
Contacted by a reporter, Pegues said she had never seen the 17-year-old, her boyfriend, get in trouble. She remembered him desperately repeating “junior, junior!” to make sure officers didn’t confuse him with his father, who has the same name and a long criminal record. The boy’s charges for being a minor in possession of a concealed firearm were ultimately dropped. Efforts to reach Ebony Anderson for this story were unsuccessful.
He had been using a loaner van that lacked a lockbox key while his usual car was in for repairs. He left his weapons in the car parked outside his house because he didn’t want to have guns inside with his son around, he said — but that violated policy. Supervisors also verbally warned him about his social media usage, saying they worried that his posts had led to his car getting burglarized, though they produced no direct evidence.
The way he began to see it, he had given everything to the department, yet his SWAT “family” had turned their backs and discarded him as soon as he spoke up about the rights of Black teenagers. Wyche’s current supervisor, Reginald James, said he believes leaders like former chief Brian Dugan were looking to push Wyche out.
Sometimes, Wyche confided his frustrations in Randolph, the Black Lives Matter activist. The relentless optimism that had initially annoyed her was wearing thin. “It probably hurt him quite a bit to find the thin blue line only runs so deep, and at the end of the day, he is Black,” she said. To Randolph, he replied: “My currency doesn’t reside in the department. It resides in the community I’m fighting for.”
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