Imagine for a moment that you can’t
breathe. You have asthma, but it’s been more than a year
since your last real attack, so you’ve left your inhaler at
home. You’re at the police academy, running a drill, learning
all about discipline, integrity, teamwork, brotherhood in blue,
yadda yadda, and, sure enough, when you suddenly start to cough up
your guts, spew snot, wheeze and gulp for air, several of your
fellow recruits try to help.
The commanders, however, wave them away,
saying, “Leave her if she can’t keep up.”
So there you are, frantic for oxygen, and no
one is allowed to render aid. Only after you croak out a request
for medical assistance do you get a ride into town for an albuterol
treatment.
Now, if that happened to you, would you be
irate? I think I would be. But remember: Everything’s
relative. And to Renatta Frazier, who survived this experience, it
barely blipped her radar screen. In more than two years of frequent
conversations, she never mentioned this incident to me. I heard
about it from one of her academy classmates — a recruit who
witnessed Frazier’s asthma attack firsthand and, to this day, is equal parts pissed
and appalled (and no, this other recruit is not black).
It also didn’t make it into The Enemy in Blue —
the book Frazier is selling at a Saturday book-signing —
sharing her side of the scandal that made her the Springfield
Police Department’s most famous ex-officer.
Yes, brace yourselves, citizens. Just when you
thought that Frazier — the black rookie officer erroneously
accused of “failing to prevent the rape of a fellow
officer’s daughter” — had ridden off into the
sunset with her fat settlement check from her race-discrimination
lawsuit, she’s back from her new home in suburban Atlanta for
a few days to peddle her tell-all book.
And I do mean “tell-all.”
It’s tough to predict what will set more AM talk-show tongues a-waggin’ — the bitter accusations Frazier levels
at SPD’s upper ranks, her sharp words for some members of the
black community, or the soft porn that throbs through chapter one
(on second thought, I’ll put my money on chapter one).
Along with her son Kourtney Mitchell, Frazier
wrote this book while waiting for the city of Springfield to settle
her lawsuit. It is infused with the spirit of a willful woman
forced to stew silently while people who never met her discussed
and dissected her character as though she were as unfeeling as a piece of stone. Writing was the
best therapy she could afford, and she worked at it religiously.
Still, anybody of a mind to criticize will
have a field day with Frazier’s tome. Several legitimate
publishing houses expressed interest in her manuscript, but she
didn’t like their leisurely timetable. So she decided to
press this book herself, and it reads like a promising rough draft
in search of an editor. It could have benefited from a spell check,
a grammar check, and, especially, a reality check. People she likes
get special treatment (in her book, I’m young and skinny; in
real life, I’m aged and gelatinous), and people she dislikes
get body-slammed (Carl Madison left town just in time).
I know for a fact that Frazier got some of her
facts wrong — most by accident but a few because of her
belief that she was the victim of a grand conspiracy. For example,
she insists that the mainstream media knew the truth long before Illinois Times discovered
it, yet she provides no evidence to support that charge.
Still, it would be a shame for people to focus
on the book’s flaws and miss the positive and poignant
messages. The Enemy in Blue is a testament to the power of family —
both Frazier’s family of origin and her husband and children
— and suggests that she would have gladly sworn the same deep
loyalty to SPD.
Instead, the career she had dreamed of almost
tore her family apart, and she describes the poisonous ripple
effects in excruciating detail.
It will be interesting to see whether this raw
book quells the rumors or answers the questions that have been
floating around here the past two years. The most persistent is the
notion — occasionally posed as a query, usually stated as
irrefutable fact — that “Frazier never should’ve
been a cop.” Most people who say that never met Frazier, and
most will admit there are at least a few white males on the
department payroll who shouldn’t have badges or guns.
I don’t see how anybody can say for
sure, though. What’s clear to me is this: No one ever gave
Frazier a chance.
Renatta Frazier will be selling and signing
her book from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Crowne Plaza.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
