No one understands the fellowship among police officers better than former Lt. Bob Angone, a Chicago Police Department lifer.
And at no other time during his career did Angone feel the bond more acutely than on Sept. 13, 1976, when one of his men, Officer Patrick Crowley, was shot and killed in a drug raid.
For Angone, the loss was devastating. Crowley was a 10-year veteran whose department file was filled with unsolicited commendations from victims and citizens whom he helped.
But it was at his funeral, when Angone looked into the eyes of Crowley’s wife Joanne, married to Pat just a year earlier, that the personal tragedy hit him hardest. Particularly because six years earlier, Joanne was engaged to another officer, Tom Kelly, a close friend of Angone, who was shot and killed in the line of duty a week before Pat and Tom were to marry.
In the 40 years since, not a day goes by that Angone does not think about all three of them.
Today, Angone is retired after 33 years as a patrol officer, tactical sergeant and SWAT coordinator. His wife Theresa, also retired, was a tactical and undercover officer for the department for 34 years.
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As a “cop’s cop,” when Angone speaks or writes to newspapers about the egregious problems within the Chicago Police Department, other cops, civilians and even politicians listen.
I listened when Angone emailed me about the criminal case against Officer Jason Van Dyke, who is charged with murder in the October 2014 shooting death of 17-year-old LaQuan McDonald — a shocking act recorded on a police dashboard camera and displayed online for the world to see.
“The McDonald case should have never happened,” Angone said. “One police officer out of seven on the scene fired his weapon.
“They had called for a Taser, a less lethal weapon. A supervisor should have instituted ‘firearm discipline’ as soon as that Taser was called for — no deadly force unless being attacked or to save a life, containment mode until a less-deadly solution is instituted.
“By ‘containment,’ I mean holding him (McDonald) to a certain area if possible until a less-lethal weapon gets there. It’s not always possible, but it would not call for assassination or more than one or two shots. We are not in the business to kill, just prevent and stop.”
Angone feels strongly that debacles such as the McDonald shooting, in which Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald, occur because of a lack of experience and/or practical training of patrol officers.
So how does the CPD get fixed? The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are investigating. But what does a cop’s cop think should be done?
Angone sees a two-pronged solution. The first is what he calls his “out of the box” suggestion for on-the-job training for beat cops.
“Gang specialists working with the beat guys in actual patrols for short periods of time so they (patrol officers) could know what they are seeing. This could be done by rotating gang and beat people maybe two days a month.”
There’s no evidence that Laquan McDonald was a gang member. What Angone believes is that members of the special Gang Crimes units that were disbanded by former police Supt. Garry McCarthy can school beat cops to better handle street crime and violence.
“This cannot be done by going to the (police) academy. It must take place in the (police) district of the beat cops. In other words, community policing with the police getting together to share the community problems.”
Angone’s second idea has to do with more effective monitoring of what he calls the “outliers” — officers such as Van Dyke with a lengthy history of complaints, or “beefs,” about excessive force or how they dealt with incidents.
“Beefs were always one of my best management tools,” he said. “If one of my people started to get beefs and was an outlier, I used counseling and made their sergeant aware of it and had the sergeant ride with the individual until he or she got it.
“(Such officers) have to be monitored or you wind up with the likes of Van Dyke — outliers getting beefs until it explodes and backfires on the rest of good cops.”
I have never met Angone in person. And as a civilian, I can’t know what police must confront every day. It’s a dangerous vocation that often takes a heavy emotional toll over the years and can render any officer callous and cynical.
But Angone inspires some hope for the future.
“People act differently when they are being watched or the light of day is upon them. It’s the time and place in policing history, at least in Chicago, that there’s a new dawn.
“Do the right thing or suffer the consequences. The policing world is not at an end as we know it. It’s just going to come out from the shadows and force us to be more professional.”
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage. [email protected]