Three questions about police reform

Boston police commissioner Michael Cox is running the department he once sued, after being beaten by his fellow officers while he was in plainclothes.

How do I think about identity? How do I create change? How should I respond when faced with prejudice and hate?

In America’s reckoning on police violence and race, these are three fundamental questions. There are others, of course, but it’s hard to imagine the nation moving too much further toward progress without wrestling with some variation of these questions.

In the Feb. 20 cover story by Kalpana Jain, we glimpse how one man answers them. Of course, no one man or woman could ever answer these questions to everyone’s satisfaction. But Michael Cox, and the path he has taken to this moment, deserves every reader’s consideration. 

Mr. Cox is commissioner of the Boston Police Department. In 1995, as a plainclothes officer for the same department, he was mistaken by fellow police officers for a gang member, and they beat him brutally. When the department did not so much as apologize, he sued. 

Mr. Cox would later say that, when he first came to the Boston Police Department, he never thought of himself as a Black officer. “He was the young man from a middle-class Black family who believed character and hard work meant more than race,” wrote Dick Lehr, author of the book about the beating, “The Fence.” “In many ways he was color-blind.”

But Mr. Cox was beaten because he is Black. And at that point, he had a choice. The young man who was raised to be obedient and respectful could let it go, or he could fight for change. That fight took the shape of a lawsuit. He was called a “troublemaker” and threatened. But everything he has done since that moment, he said at his swearing-in as commissioner, has been to change policing.

Ask those around Mr. Cox to describe him and how that moment of racial violence has defined him, and many find the same words. “Soft-spoken” and “tender-hearted,” someone who carries himself with “dignity,” and “a gentleman all the time.” One former colleague admitted that she expected to find him resentful. Instead, she was struck by the genuineness of his insistence that he was not.

The challenges facing the new police commissioner are substantial. The triumph of running the department he once sued does not guarantee his approach will elevate policing, reinvigorate a demoralized force, or reestablish trust with communities of color.

Yet the triumph is still profound. Mr. Cox entered the job he loved wishing only to be seen as a human – an agent of good with a shining badge. That idealism met the fist of persistent racial prejudice, by people wearing the same badge. But it never yielded. It evolved, it hardened, it fought, and it persisted. But it never lost that unction of humanity that allowed Mr. Cox to look around the precinct and see only brothers and sisters – and to see the same in the communities he policed.

Whatever lies ahead for Mr. Cox, that vision is a legacy for all to serve and protect.