Untitled Document
When the jury announced its verdict in the Black
Guardians’ race-discrimination trial earlier this month, Lea Joy left
the courthouse pursued by a gaggle of reporters whose questions she tersely
declined to answer. “I don’t think it’s the right time
for me to speak,” she said. “You can follow me all the way to
the car, and I’ll still have no comment.”
She went home, climbed into bed, assumed the fetal
position, and felt a 20-year struggle to survive as Springfield’s
first black female police officer seize her chest with physical pain. She had lost, spectacularly, in federal court. The
jury denied her claim that the overwhelmingly white and male Springfield
Police Department had become a “racially hostile work
environment” for Joy, as well as a more specific allegation that
Joy’s transfer from the internal affairs division to street patrol
was retaliation for her support of another embattled black female cop. Even worse, during the trial she had heard fellow
officers — some she could’ve sworn were her friends —
take the witness stand to question her memory, her common sense, her
competence, her sanity and the very thing Joy prizes most: her professional
integrity.
But when the trial ended on the afternoon of Jan. 11,
Joy surrendered only a few hours to sadness and sleep. By 9 p.m., hunger
had roused her. She got up, made herself some dinner, phoned her grown
children to assure them that no, Mom didn’t “do anything
stupid,” and then called her attorney, Zoe Newton, to express her
appreciation. “The grieving time was over,” Joy says.
“It was time to get up and go again.”
Even people who know Joy personally — people
who have gotten zinged by her quick humor and or annoyed by her childlike
laugh — would be caught off guard by her upbeat reaction to the
trial. Despite her loss, she has nothing but compliments for U.S. District
Judge Jeanne Scott and nothing but gratitude for the jurors who decided her
fate. “I’m like that little boy that steps in a
big steaming pile of manure,” she says, chuckling. “I figure it
means there’s got to be a horse around here somewhere.”
The horse in this instance is healing. The entire
tedious and torturous trial process — depositions, discovering
documents, dredging up experiences both good and bad — has given her
a new and deeper understanding of her tenure at SPD. Even the most painful
days in court, when she had to listen as former co-workers suggested that
she was ill suited for the profession she loved, have helped her grasp why
she was not fully accepted by the boys in blue. She has no plans to appeal the jury’s verdict;
she’s offended that anybody would ever imagine she was in this battle
for the money. However, trial testimony tainted her reputation in ways that
she can’t stomach, and she is hellbent on setting the record
straight. To Joy, it’s a simple matter of righting a wrong. Her
obsession to do see it done — that’s just the cop in her.
Among the relics Joy
recently unearthed from her stash of SPD memorabilia is a snapshot taken in
1983, when she was a raw recruit at the Illinois State Police Academy. It shows fledgling officers from a variety of
agencies seated at long tables in a classroom. In front of each recruit
sits a white placard displaying his or her name. All the recruits appear to
be focused on Joy — the only African-American in the room.
She’s sitting front and center, holding her shiny new badge and
smiling. On the table in front of her is a nameplate identifying her as
“Lea Jo Honky.”
Back then she was married, and the placard must have
been a play on her married name, Lea Joy Hawkins. The photo is faded; the printing on the placards is
blurry. It’s difficult to decipher the writing. Still, it’s
clear that most officers in the room thought this racially tinged joke was
humorous. Even Joy. Even now. “I didn’t take offense because I was used
to those things. Some things you have to just let wash off your
back,” she says. Almost 60, Joy remembers when racism was as blatant
as signs posted above lunch counters in her hometown, Decatur. But she came
of age during the civil-rights movement, and was infected with the
optimistic expectation that things had changed for the better. She brought that outlook to her pioneering role at
SPD, as the first black female on the force. “I was up for any of
it,” she says. In her heart, she believed that the other officers
would accept her because they would recognize that she was just as
passionate about the job as they were.
“She really cares,” says a retired
officer, who didn’t want his name used, “and she would get
really irritated by people who don’t care as much as she
does.”
During her 20 years on the department, she rose
through the ranks, retiring in 2004 as a civil-service lieutenant —
the highest level an officer could achieve absent political appointment.
Her career, however, traveled a different arc
than most. Most officers start out in street patrol, where they learn the
ropes and make friends. Joy spent a significant portion of her first years
at SPD assigned to drive the prisoner-transport van rather than patrol,
then to desk jobs such as crime prevention and IA. When she was sent back
to the streets, once as a sergeant and once as a lieutenant, the gaps in
her experience showed. Among her critics, she was tagged as indecisive and
“book smart” — which, coming from cops, isn’t
necessarily a compliment. During the trial, several officers took the witness
stand and used this term to describe Joy. These officers — most
notably current SPD Chief Ralph Caldwell — were called to testify by
the city of Springfield, to suggest nonracial explanations for Joy’s
inability to fit in. Caldwell made “book smart” sound like a
euphemism. Asked whether he would call her incompetent, Caldwell said yes. “She was constantly training and
retraining. She was very book smart, and she went to every class she
could,” he said. “But I’m not saying she actually
improved. . . . We took steps to try to work with Lea . . . . I’m not
sure I was successful.”
He testified that Joy questioned procedures.
“She didn’t want to follow the norm,” he said.
“You’d spend countless hours trying to explain things to
her.”
Caldwell claimed that he would “put her in my
car” and take her on service calls and that he responded to her calls
“more than any other officer in my career” in an effort to help
her. However, another high-ranking officer, now retired,
said Caldwell’s testimony was a gross exaggeration. “Please
stop reading those quotes. You’re making my stomach hurt,” he
said. Joy also quibbles with Caldwell’s testimony.
Their street (or “field operations”) assignments overlapped by
only about six months, in the latter half of 1995. Before that, Joy was in
crime prevention and then out on medical leave with a broken foot. She
remembers riding in a car with him only once. “I believe Caldwell told the truth: I was
different,” she says. “When I was a [patrol] officer, I would
go to a scene and nobody would talk to me. I had to figure out everything
on my own. So he was right: I did do book learning, because that’s
the only way I was going to find out.”
Lending credence to
Joy’s perspective is a document that surfaced during the discovery
phase leading up to the trial. One of the Black Guardians’ attorneys,
Courtney Cox, got court permission to have a computer expert search for
racist material on SPD hard drives. The massive search uncovered a few embarrassing
surprises but also at least one thoughtful document written about Joy.
Addressed to no one, it reads like a journal entry: “I was able to speak with one of my female
peers at length tonight concerning her experiences in police work. As this
female is also African American, she has faced a number of difficulties
that I am unfamiliar with. I have always had a good relationship with this
officer, and she speaks very freely to me. Her career has led her to the
same location that I am in, watch commander, but her career took a very
different path that didn’t prepare her for the duties she now has,
and she struggles with her responsibilities. She didn’t spend much
time on the street as a patrol officer before being assigned to a
specialized position in crime prevention. She spent the next several years
in crime prevention before she made sergeant. Once promoted, she remained
in specialized, non-patrol positions for several more years. She was
promoted to lieutenant the same day I was, but our levels of experience
were worlds apart. She was only familiar with crime prevention, while I had
the opportunity to spend 11 years in patrol (patrol officer and sergeant),
two years as narcotics unit supervisor, two years as an investigative
supervisor overseeing homicides/robberies/sex assaults. Additionally, I had
also served a number of years on the department’s tactical team. My
career had well prepared me for my new role as a lieutenant, while hers has
not. “She has always felt that she was under a
microscope based on her gender and race and to some degree I’m sure
she was/is. She has become rather paranoid over the years due to this
perceived scrutiny, and this has caused her to act much more cautiously in
her decision making process. That is one area that we discussed at length.
She pointed out that if I make a decision, the chance of it being second
guessed by the bosses is very minor, while she feels like every decision
she makes is second guessed. She refers to the ‘boys network’
as she discussed this matter. She feels like she has never really been made
a part of the team, and this has clearly impacted her negatively. As I
reflected on the things she told me, it strikes me as very unfair that she
has been denied one of the things that I hold so dearly about this job, and
that is the sense of belonging. This has been denied her, and that is truly
sad. This conversation, and others with her before, has increased my desire
to see that none of the young female officers on my watch suffer the
unfairness that my more senior peer has.”
At trial, SPD Deputy Chief Clay Dowis was shown this
computer fragment and asked to read it to himself. He then identified it as
his own writing. However, because the date typed on top indicated it was
written in 2004 — after the BGA lawsuit was filed — a city
attorney objected to its relevance and the jury never saw the document.
The most specific claim
Joy filed against the city was retaliation because of an abrupt and
involuntary transfer out of internal affairs and onto the street in
November 2001. Then-chief John Harris testified that the transfer
wasn’t retaliatory but rather due to Joy’s insubordination.
Joy, he said, had failed to follow his order to reinterview another black
female officer, Renatta Frazier. The incident had already been investigated by another
officer. The complaint itself was relatively minor — a
“courtesy and image” incident in which a citizen claimed that
Frazier had behaved rudely. She had been off duty when she encountered a
man driving erratically, and approached him at a stop light to ask whether
he needed help. They got into an argument and exchanged profanities. Then
both Frazier and the motorist telephoned SPD to report the incident.
At the trial, Harris consistently said he wanted Joy
to ask Frazier just one question: whether she displayed her badge to the
motorist. Joy knew that one question was loaded — Frazier had told
the original IA interviewer that she did not display her badge, yet she had
told the dispatcher that she did. If Joy could nail down this
inconsistency, then Frazier could be charged with a “Rule 27
violation” — lying. For a peace officer, lying was grounds for
termination.
At trial, Joy insisted that she did not refuse
Harris’s order; she simply couldn’t contact Frazier, who was on
medical leave. Joy even presented copies of e-mails she had sent to Harris
documenting how many times she had tried to call Frazier. (After the trial,
she located a page of questions she had typed out to ask Frazier, as well
as a yellow pad with scribbles noting the complainant’s traffic
citations — info, such as the fact that he had no valid
driver’s license, she was surprised wasn’t already on file.) “Doesn’t that tell you I was continuing
an investigation?” Joy asks. She admits: She didn’t agree with
Harris’s request. “I was very upset about it, and I thought we
were harassing Frazier. But it never came into my mind that I could stop an
investigation on my own,” Joy says. “The smartest thing Harris
could’ve done was order me to continue the investigation. I was going
to go after her. And I might’ve gotten her, too.”
Looking back, Joy theorizes that the real reason
Harris transferred her out of IA might not have been retaliation after all
but rather to prevent her from overhearing discussions about another
investigation IA had started against Frazier.
That investigation
evolved into a major scandal that ended the careers of almost everyone who
touched it. It started in the wee hours of Oct. 31, 2001, with a 911 call
from a girl in a Brandon Court apartment, complaining that several men were
knocking on her door. Frazier — pulling a double shift that night
— responded to the call, used a spotlight to search the area, and had
a dispatcher telephone the girl. Seeing no signs of a disturbance and
getting no answer on the phone, Frazier left to handle another call. Six hours later, the girl called 911 again, saying
the men had returned to her door. This time, officers found her apartment
open. The girl — daughter of a police officer — told them she
had been raped. Within a few hours, then-Assistant Chief Dan Hughes
filed an internal affairs complaint against Frazier insinuating that she
failed to prevent the rape. Weeks later, that allegation was leaked to the State Journal-Register and
repeated by the media for a year. Amid these salacious accusations, Frazier
resigned from the force and moved her family out of state. In October 2002,
an Illinois Times investigation
revealed that the accusation had been totally false: the rape actually
occurred before Frazier was ever dispatched to the scene. More than any other officer, Joy stood up for
Frazier. At a special Springfield City Council meeting called in response
to the IT story,
all the Black Guardians arrived in uniform, but only Joy sought permission
from their police chief to speak. She addressed the aldermen, telling them
that Harris had to have known all along that the information being
broadcast about Frazier was untrue. But to her horror, at the recent trial, Joy was
accused of the same crime. Mary Vasconcelles, who had been assistant chief
of IA in 2002, testified that she showed Joy the police report with the
true sequence of events the morning after the rape, suggesting that Joy
knew all along that the allegation against Frazier wasn’t true.
Vasconcelles’ testimony infuriated Joy. “You don’t know how hard it was for me to
sit in my seat when these people were denigrating my integrity,” she
fumes. “I didn’t mind them having their opinions and all that,
but when they questioned that I wasn’t going to be honest about
everything, that pissed me off to no end.”
Yet she insists she can’t remember whether she
ever saw the sexual-assault report, in which the accurate chronology is
mentioned on the fourth and final page. And Joy, being Joy, refused to
testify otherwise.
“I don’t remember and I’m not going
to lie and say that I do remember,” Joy says, “but you can be
sure that had I known the sequence of events, it would’ve taken my
whole department to stop me [from speaking out]. I would’ve given up
my job rather than allow Renatta to spend a year’s time of that hell
of thinking that she failed to prevent the rape of another woman. As a
mother, as a woman, no, I couldn’t have done it.”
The trial, and the
preparation leading up to it, forced Joy to review her entire career with
SPD — to search for friends who might speak up for her (her field
training officer, George Judd, told jurors that Joy was “an excellent
police officer”), to gather any mementos that might prove racial
malice (Joy admits: she didn’t apply herself to such a search), and
to confront accusations attorneys used to defend the city of Springfield.
The whole process was painful, Joy says. “I didn’t realize how many emotions I had
squashed until the deposition. As much as I hate to show my emotions in
public, I just sobbed through the whole damn deposition. I felt bad for the
attorneys that had to go through it,” she says. Yet her sense of humor seemed stronger than anything
else. When she recalls getting assigned to the midnight shift, she laughs
at herself for brushing off the warning one officer gave: “He said,
‘We’ve discussed it on third watch, and we don’t want
you. We’ve voted you off.’
“What is that saying — fools go in where
angels fear to tread? That was me!” Joy says. “I had so many
guardian angels, they must’ve tagged each other like in a
professional wrestling match.”
But if she had her life to live over again, would she
make a different career choice? “Golly. . . ” she sighs, then ponders for
a moment. “I’d have joined [SPD] sooner so I could’ve
stayed longer, and I’d speak up even more.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2008.
