He Was A Black Man Man Who Hated Cops Until He Became One—On LA’s Notorious Skid Row

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Our next storyteller is a law enforcement consultant, author, and an active senior lead officer in Los Angeles.

Well, let him introduce himself. Let’s take a listen.

I’m Dion Joseph. I am a twenty-seven-year veteran of law enforcement. My primary assignment is working in the Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles, working with the homeless. Been doing so for about twenty-five years. It’s ended up being my calling. The reason it became my calling was kind of weird. I never wanted to be a police officer. I was raised—not raised or indoctrinated by friends and activist groups that I ran with—that the police were basically my natural mortal enemy, and a couple of times I was racially profiled; it didn’t help when I was a civilian. Then came the Rodney King incident. And the Rodney King incident, on top of the insult and injury of those officers getting off for doing that horrible act that they engaged in, really, really had a negative impact on me. So I suffered from what’s called availability bias. The only thing that was being shown or told to me about police officers was negative. My favorite rap groups were Public Enemy, N.W.A., K.R.S.-One, and everything they said was either after police or the police were beasts. They were monsters who were trying to exterminate Black people.

And I bought into it. I bought into it.

And what happened was, my father and mother—they founded the first Black-owned restaurant in the city of Long Beach. Literally, they were history makers, and their goal was to try to employ the power, the community, and it worked. He had a successful construction business. He was giving guys second chances who couldn’t get chances because their criminal record and whatnot. And when we started that restaurant in that shopping center, it was pretty successful.

And then the riots hit.

And after the riots, our construction company suffered because not a lot of people wanted to hire a Black-owned company as one of the fallouts of the so-called rebellion, and I was out of work for about—I want to say—about three or four months, no paycheck. And I just met the most beautiful woman in the world, my beautiful wife, Tasha. And of course, you don’t want to be a deadbeat. You want to be able to support and take care of her, your future wife. So I put my name in the hats of many jobs, many jobs, and not one called me. And then I had a friend and an uncle—an uncle who was on the police force—and he says, ‘Hey, our department is hiring.’

‘Want to put your name in that hat?’

And I was like, ‘That police force? I just—I saw what they did to Rodney King. I’m not going to do this!’

‘I will never be with that department!’

And things got worse for me, and finally I just said, ‘You know what? Go ahead and put your name in the hat and see what happens.’ And if they called me, I felt like I was going to do like three years and quit and go finish college or something like that, or do something else. So anyway, I was praying and praying and praying for other jobs to call me, and the only one that called me was my current agency.

And I’ll never forget.

When I got the letter, I was in my mom’s restaurant, and three of my childhood friends—people who had known me for years—were sitting at a table eating some short ribs and chicken. And I told my mom. I said, ‘Mom, I passed! I made it!’ And she started celebrating, and she was saying, ‘My son’s going to be a police officer!’ All three of my friends looked at me. I won’t call them friends; I’ll call them associates. Looked at my friends—would never desert me—looked at me, stood up, walked out of the restaurant, and wanted nothing to do with me anymore. And I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even put on the badge yet, but it was affecting my quote-unquote ‘blackness,’ so to speak. You know, as we’re in the age of identity politics, you know, there’s a certain way you have to identify yourself as a Black man, and I guess they didn’t see me as a Black man anymore. They saw me as the enemy. And I hadn’t even put on a uniform yet. So nonetheless, I was raised not to really care about what people thought about me.

I had a goal.

I wanted to take care of my wife, and I wanted to get married and be a good supporter. And I joined, and before joining, I’ll never forget my wife’s side of the family. They didn’t have a very good relationship with the police; in fact, it was horrendous. You know, you’re talking about police officers back in the seventies kidnapping my mother-in-law and driving her around a block, threatening to hurt her. You know, cousins of theirs who were shot, unarmed, and things of that nature. They were not fans of the police. So I kept getting it from all sides, you know. From my mother-in-law’s side, it was, ‘Don’t let those quote-unquote “white boys” change you. Don’t let those white boys change you. Here’s what they did to me back in nineteen sixty.’ Everything was past tense. Everything was past tense, and it was scaring me. It was scaring me, and of course, my dad—he was a little disappointed at first that I joined because, of course, every father wants his son to continue the legacy of the business. But that just wasn’t for me. So he was telling me, ‘You know, you know about all the horror stories that my uncle saw on the job.’ And all these things were swirling in my mind. So I’ll never forget.

It was the…

Christmas night, I proposed to my wife. She said yes, thank God! And the next morning, December twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-five, I was standing in what’s called the black line. It was a tradition in the police academy that when you’re on your first day at the academy, all applicants have to stand on a black line. And basically what happens is, they’re testing your will; they’re testing you.

You have your instructors…

Yelling at you and barking at you, seeing if you had the temperament or the—you know—to be a police officer. And I think we had several of my classmates quit. And the whole time, I’m thinking, ‘I know these guys are about to call me the N-word!’

It never happened. Never happened—in the academy.

Ninety percent of what we learned was more about human relations and Spanish than how to keep our heads from being blown off our shoulders. That’s how crazy it was. It’s like it was complete opposite or juxtaposed to what my family and friends were telling me.

And I was surprised at how open they allowed me to be.

I was able to share how many African Americans felt about the police and my experiences with the police, and no one shunned me. They listened, and it was really a great experience. I actually helped. It actually helped me break down stereotypes that I had of my white classmates and the other classmates I had, so but that didn’t cure me yet.

And you’re listening to Dion Joseph, a senior lead officer in Los Angeles, share his story—his early resentment and partially well-learned resentment of the police. He had had encounters that weren’t good. But, my goodness, what he was learning as he was becoming an officer—about his friends and himself and his fellow officers—well, it was a learning experience for everyone. When we come back, more of Dion Joseph’s story here on Our American Stories.

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Let’s continue where we last left off.

Then I ended up graduating from the academy, and I ended up in the field in Venice Beach, and I’ll never forget: my first training officer was basically abusive to me.

He was very, very cruel.

His whole mantra was, ‘It’s my job not to hire you, to get you fired!’ And basically, I was just close to getting fired. And my second training officer was a department legend. His name was Bill Snowden, and they told me to study up on him, and I pulled some of his police reports, and I’m looking at this guy. He made twenty-three hundred arrests in a Black neighborhood called Oakwood. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m about to work with this guy—a white guy who arrested twenty-three hundred Black people, a small part of Venice Beach!’ And I was like, ‘All the things my family was telling me, and all the things they put in my heart, you know, was swelling up inside me!’

And I was scared.

So finally I meet the man, and we get in the car, and I work with him. He drove me over to Oakwood where he patrols, and it was the strangest thing. I’m driving through the area with this six-foot-four, blond-haired, blue-eyed, white guy with a big old mustache, right—the stereotypical vision of what people would think a racist cop would look like.

And as he’s driving through the community, I’m hearing this: ‘Hey, Snow! Hey, God bless you, Snowden! Hey, thanks for helping my cousin, Snowden!’

‘Oh my God! Hey, thanks for helping my cousin while he was in jail, Snowden!’ And I’m sitting here like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ‘You know, is this guy scaring the community so bad that they just smile away?’ I thought I was in an episode of The Godfather or something like that.

It was weird.

And he saw the look on my face, and he pulled the car over. He says, ‘You got something on your mind?’ I was like, ‘Sir, I don’t understand it. You’re in a Black community. You arrested half the people here and their mother. Why do these people love you?’ And he said this: He said, ‘Dion, this is Oakwood. It’s one of the most violent areas in the city. You know, I’m not here because these people are Black. I’m here because I’m not. People die. These people understand why we’re here. But what they also want you to do is, whether you’re arresting them or counseling them or whatever, you make sure you treat them with dignity and respect. That’s all they want from us.’ And he said, ‘As long as you work for me, young man, you will treat everyone we contact with dignity and respect.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa! Thank God, another stereotype was completely broken down that my family was feeding me!’ And it really, really helped me bring my tunnel vision about, you know, groups of people—you know, especially white police officers. So, and it wasn’t that he was giving me permission to do that. I already knew that that was the cop I wanted to be. It was just good to know that an officer of his status—this legend, this department legend—believed in the same thing I believed in. And it was a pleasure working with this man. And after my probation was up, he literally saved my career. I graduated from probation, and it ended up at Central Division. And Central Division is where Skid Row is now. I wasn’t really excited about going to Skid Row at all. I remember one of my training officers telling me, ‘Dion, you have to wear a body, kind of, in the work there. The people have Hepatitis A, HIV; they’ve got needles in their pocket. You’re gonna get in their use of force and get stuck with a needle and give your wife the herpes!’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ At the time, I was a germaphobe. I would, like, wear five gloves to search people. You know, that’s just who I was. And it really scared me. And then he also said, ‘The cops—they are also fat and lazy. They just let people do anything they want to do over there.’ I was like, ‘What? Oh man!’ So I get on a freeway and I’m driving, and it’s a hot summer day—I think it’s in June or July—and I’m looking at the beautiful, picturesque L.A. skyline, and I’m like, ‘This can’t be that bad!’

‘Look, the Bank Tower’s over there!’

‘Look at all these skyscrapers! It can’t be that bad!’ I get off on Sixth Street, and as I get off on Sixth Street, I’m at the basin of the West Coast—a symbol of America’s economic might and power—and I’m seeing people in business suits. I’m seeing people drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, getting ready to go for work. And I said, ‘What is my training officer talking about?’

‘This is great!’

Now, you know, if you get to some bad places, there’s like about a mile-and-a-half stretch of territory that kind of warned you first.

‘You are now entering Hoodville!’

‘Get ready!’ This did not happen here. As soon as I crossed Spring Street, I’ll never forget. It was like I tripped and fell into Dante’s Inferno, Mad Max, Thunderdome, Waterworld. You know, any natural disaster movie—I think an airplane fell from the sky.

It was…

They’re really that bad. I’ll never forget the smells. I remember seeing people having sex on the sidewalk. I remember seeing people shooting up and small crack right two blocks from a police station in broad daylight. I remember trash piled so high that it came up to your knees, tents rocking, people arguing in the street. And I remember the saddest thing I saw:

Was a young man in…

A hospital gown, walking in the middle of the street, talking to himself. Clearly, he was mentally ill and had been thrown away. And I said to myself, ‘God, I can’t fix this! I’m going to put my transfer in as soon as I get into the station!’ I get into the station, and sure enough, it was the same thing. The same things I smelled and saw on the outside were inside, sitting on the bench, waiting to get transported to jail. I’m seeing parolees, gang members, homeless people, mentally ill people handcuffed to the bench, yelling, screaming, headbutting each other, set-tripping. And I’m like, ‘Wow!’ And I’m noticing the officers are just typing like nothing’s happening. And I look at one of my classmates, and I’m like, ‘Do you see what the hell is happening here?’ And she just lit some incense and kept on talking. I was like, ‘What? What happened?’

‘You know?’

I did upstairs on a light, and go put my transfer in. Go put my transfer in. And there was a sergeant who used to call us all ‘Hermino’ or ‘brother’ in Spanish. He said, ‘Hey, Hermino, your officer, Joseph! Hey, your first two months are going to be spent working the front desk of Central Station!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, thank God! God answered my prayer!’ So I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to deal with this crap!’ ‘Two months breaking the front desk? I was wrong!’ At the front desk, and it was the first of the month, and every five to ten to twenty minutes, somebody came in from Skid Row with their arm broken backward, where they could swing it forty-five degrees the other way. One lady came in with her cheeks lacerated, so like she had a second mouth. You could see her teeth. Another man walked into the station holding his stomach and moved his hand, and his intestines fell out, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And the common thread with all of these people was, ‘I don’t want a police report. I just want an ambulance to take me to the hospital.’ ‘I have to live here,’ because what I didn’t realize was, what I did realize was, the station was in the heart of where Skid Row was. I also discovered the cops there weren’t fat and lazy. They were just working in a time where the justice system didn’t support their efforts, kind of what we’re living in right now. So I’m like, ‘Man, get me off this front desk! I can’t take it!’ And then I get my first basic patrol car, and it was Chinatown! Like Chinatown? Yes, cultured people in the park stretching and doing tai chi, and great eating spots!

And I’m telling you, it was beautiful!

Your blood pressure went down just parking there, right? And I’m about to write my first ticket. I was there only five minutes, about to write my first ticket at Alpine and—if I remember correctly—we get a call: ‘One A One, respond to Seventh and San Julian for an attack in progress!’ Back then, ‘attack’ meant rape, sexual assault. So we’re driving like bats out of hell to get down there, and sure enough, we get there, and there’s a woman sitting with her legs crossed, rocking back and forth. She was literally torn to shreds: face messed up, bleeding, skirt torn, and people were standing around her, mocking her.

And I got out of the car, and I tried to talk to her, and she would, and talk.

And all I hear these gang members (excuse my French) saying, ‘Oh, that ain’t gonna talk to you!’ ‘Oh, you want—you want—you must be new here! Get your back in the car, man!’

Man.

‘She ain’t gonna tell you nothing,’ and literally, she told me nothing. I had to take a Jane Doe assault report, caught her in ambuscade, and that was that. And I couldn’t believe what I saw. So my partner says, ‘Let’s not go back, he…’