Wilbur Cooper, thank you so much for talking with us.

- It's my pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me.

- So, and at the Black Shield, you talk about policing as really the family business.

Two of your great uncles, your mom, your dad, your sister, a whole family tree.

Do you remember what you thought about that, if you thought about that when you were growing up?

You know, for me and my family, the policing was always seen as sort of a step to get into the middle class.

And so I think my parents really always were encouraging me to take a different route or a different path.

So for me, I never really considered it.

It was always, you know, sort of we did that so you could go on and do something else.

So it was a means to an end.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Were they proud of their work?

Did they convey that to you?

Did they want you to be proud of them?

I think that there was a sense of pride of surviving in America, you know, of sort of coming.

My family originally on both sides comes from the South during the Great Migration.

They come to the North in Cleveland and live in a segregated part of town during the Jim Crow era.

And so I think there was a great sense of pride of surviving and attaining what they saw as the American dream.

Stable income, protection, safety, and more opportunities for me than previous generations had to carve out a life and be sitting here talking with you today.

And among those opportunities were you got to go to some great schools, you got a great education, became a journalist.

And in recent years, many people know your work, because of your work covering, guess what, you know, race and policing.

And I wondered when you started on that beat, did you remember thinking about, huh, I'm doing this now.

This is like your actual job now.

Yeah, so, you know, for me, I started out in journalism at Vice magazine.

And so a lot of my big stuff early on was kind of really focused on culture and counterculture.

What drew me into reporting and thinking about policing was really the Black Lives Matter movement.

You know, there were so many high profile incidents around police violence and conversations around race, when I was kind of coming of age, in my early 20s, that I felt like I needed to meet the moment and try to explore this topic.

And obviously, this is a very deeply personal topic for me, because I kind of have perspectives of it from both sides of the equation coming from a family of black police officers.

I was curious about that, like when these stories started to rise, one of them in Cleveland.

I mean, Tamir Rice was the 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy gun in the park, was shot by two Cleveland police officers, like literally minutes after they arrived there.

Did you ever talk about stuff like that with your family?

I mean, before you decided to write the book?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think my parents have a bit of this duality.

It's how I kind of describe it in the book.

That was very present at home.

I mean, we had a very, very strong black identity in my household.

And so when these incidents would come up, whether it was Rodney King, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, whatever, whatever it was, these were conversations we had at the dinner table.

And I think there was often a real just disgust and distrust with law enforcement, even though law enforcement was the institution that paid for the safety and the home and things that we had.

I think when I started to work on this book, it was trying to understand the disconnect or the dissonance between the work that my parents did, and also those conversations around some of the harms and negative impacts that can come from the carceral system.

So your book is really interesting.

The subtitle is "An American Memoir of Family and Power," but it's also set against the backdrop of what policing has been and what it does and how people get into it.

There is a tremendous amount of fierce determination, but also a lot of trauma that led to these people, led some of these folks to this point.

But why don't we just start with the first member of your family, the first in your mother's family to become a police officer.

That was your great-uncle Lloyd.

Why did he do that?

I think Uncle Lloyd is one of those exceptional larger-than-life figures.

He was handsome.

He was incredibly strong.

He had a kind of extreme personality.

He was really good with women.

He loved to gamble.

And I think he was a black man in the Jim Crow era who really wanted to have a semblance of freedom in his life.

And policing gave him the ability to be able to do the things, live the life that he wanted to live, without having to face the consequences that a lot of his peers and people around him had to face.

And so, you know, he was a really interesting person to kind of dive into, especially because when I started working on this book, so many of the things that my family had told me about him that I thought maybe were tall tales, I was able to verify.

And they ranged from being involved in a use of force in Cleveland to domestic violence to, you know, being at soirees and high-profile parties with, you know, beautiful women.

It was a broad spectrum.

And Lloyd really helped me get into this realm of telling a narrative that gave the full complexity of individuals, particularly black police officers, inside of this institution and inside of America.

Some people have theories about why different people go into policing.

Some people go into policing because they really want to help people.

And some people go into policing because they see themselves as protectors.

Some people, I think there is a feeling some people go into policing because they really like to push other people around.

So which was your uncle?

I think that the institution of policing, I believe, represented something very familiar to my great uncle.

So my great uncle came from a household that had domestic abuse.

He came from a community that had a street and gang culture.

When he was a young person, he moved on and went and joined the military.

And then after that, he went on and joined the police department.

And so there's a narrative thread of violence and of power and domination that I think is very American and sort of all around.

And so, yes, I think that there's an aspect of policing, particularly as he was someone who really identified with his physicality and his strength being able to change and determine a situation.

I imagine that the power that policing had definitely something that appealed to him or at least made sense and was familiar.

I tell you, your mother is one of the most fascinating people in this book because she grew up kind of running from the police as a kid in Cleveland, as you describe it, at a time when the police department was overwhelmingly white, even as the city was becoming increasingly diverse.

She had a whole other life before she became a police officer.

She was in an abusive marriage.

She already had three kids.

And he was brutalizing her.

So how did being a police officer kind of fit into her story?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you touched on it earlier with this idea of some people go into it wanting to be a dominator.

Other people go into it because they want to be a protector.

Or they want to sort of right the wrongs that maybe have been done to them.

And I think that's what drove my mom to do it.

For her, policing at least seemed like a lifeline.

It could give her financial stability to get away from an abusive marriage.

And coming from a childhood of abuse, policing could allow her the opportunity to right some of the wrongs that were done to her.

And so it's, as you asked earlier, is there pride amongst my family for the profession?

And I think with my mom, there is a sense of pride because of the intention with which she went into the institution with.

One of the things you really do in the book, though, is point out just how hard it is to be a black cop and how hard it can be to be a black female cop.

I mean, some of the things that your mom had to put up with just to survive in that job, I just think are hair curling, right?

- Yeah, I think my mom's early experience on the job was so harrowing because she is one of the first women to come into the Cleveland Police Department after they shut down the Women's Bureau, which was a bureau specifically for women.

But when she sort of went through the academy and came into the department, no one had any interest in showing her anything or training her or helping her get acclimated to the job.

And so some of her first interactions with her supervisor, they told her that what she was required to do was to sweep up and make coffee.

When she finally did get an assignment, it was to stand guard in a empty lot in the dead of winter, the coldest winter in Cleveland's history, inside of a broken down, busted out car with no heat.

When they finally took her on the road and put her in what's called the zone car, the police car, and were supposed to train her.

The two white officers that were her superior had her in the back seat and they pulled up to a restaurant to have lunch and they left her locked in the back seat while they went to go eat.

So these are some of the things... Because the back seat, just for people who don't know, that's where you put people who've picked up, which is why they can't get out.

So, The Black Shield is the title of your book.

It's also the name of an organization of black police officers in Cleveland.

It's kind of a club.

It started out as called The Shield Club, yes.

And basically it began in the 1940s, you know, sort of after a very intense incident called the Euclid Beach Riot, which involved black officers actually trying to defend anti-segregation protesters.

But over the decades and over the years, the organization has really ebbed and flowed between being one that has tried to fight for the concerns of the black community, and then one that has focused more on the professional concerns of black officers inside the police department.

And sometimes those two interests can be conflicting with each other.

And in 2020, during the defund the police era, it was back up in the conversation because it was another one of those moments when the organization, which had become now known as the Black Shield, was aligning itself with the black community and activists calling for change in policing.

Well, that's one of the kind of essential questions in the book really is whether you actually can change an institution from the inside.

And interestingly, and this is again, there's a lot of pain points in this book that you write about in a very sensitive way.

As you were looking into your dad's career, you discovered that he had actually shot a black man during a drug operation in 2001.

How do you understand that episode now?

Did you even know about it at the time?

Did you even know?

No, I had no idea.

And that's one of the key things about the book is trying to uncover and understand and see my dad from a different vantage.

And I was only able to sort of learn about it through, you know, using typical reporting and investigative practices of asking for, you know, my dad's files and records from the Cleveland Police Department and diving into those.

And at the time that I was diving into that story, my father was ill.

So I had no way to actually talk to him about this incident and had to really wrestle with a lot of these issues in solitude and kind of make up some conclusions myself.

And what conclusions have you come to?

You know, when you talk about the issue of individuals inside of an institution like policing, I think that, you know, individual people can make a difference.

I think that there is a benefit to having a more diverse police force.

But I think that when we talk about what a lot of these activists are talking about, which is a transformative change of values, which is a representation of America that we haven't ever really fulfilled, reforms like diversity are always going to fall short.

And so we need to hold on to both ideals at the same time, the sort of interstitial changes that can have a kind of marginal benefit that can allow us to survive, and the bigger and broader goal towards freedom, which is, you know, an internal struggle that never stops.

You say in the book that, "I go so far as to say policing is the lifeblood that has helped my family and me not merely survive but thrive.

I'm not ashamed of this because I now know more than ever just how perilous it has been to withstand a run through the American thresher.

But underneath that superficial survival, the fear remains.

And this fear is a power and a violence unto itself, a form of immense and invisible control that deforms and shrinks the spirit, especially when your identity is an acquiescence to it.

Those are some really, you know, powerful words there.

But what is that fear?

Is it the fear that these officers carry within them themselves?

Is it the fear that, making a general statement here, that most black people carry within themselves of being crushed or harmed by forces that are almost always going to see you as wrong, even if you're not?

What is that fear?

Yeah, absolutely.

It is a fear that people have within themselves in this society when they see these forces come down on people and they see that injustice, they worry and stress about it coming back to them.

But it's sort of a trick bag because no matter how much you armor yourself or protect yourself, you can always fall susceptible to that power, you know, and eventually it can come back on you.

And that fear can be a really deteriorating force, you know, to hold inside yourself constantly.

And so I think my book is trying to urge people to move beyond that fear and make some choices that are focused on not on the fear, but on freedom.

- Before we let you go, Wilbert, you did some of the hardest reporting that anybody can do, which is to kind of look at your own family, especially your parents, and see them as humans in the world in all of their beauty and all of their strength and all of their flaws.

And I wonder, at the end of that journey, did it change your mind about them and the work that they did?

Oh, yes.

I went through so many sort of emotional highs and lows as I started to uncover and understand my family and particularly my parents.

The entire journey that I went on was really about trying to understand and get to know them to get closer to them.

And my hope was that if I could get closer to them, it would also help me understand how I can move forward in my own life as I sort of enter into adulthood and enter into the spaces that they were before.

But yeah, I think having and knowing them as full individuals, as full people has been immensely important for me.

And I hope that it really helps people think about their past, their family's past, and how they can move forward as well.

- Wilbur Cooper, thank you so much for talking with me.

- Thank you.