Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Chief Exits, Memories In Tow=BY STEVE TWOMEY= Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 04:35:15 EST Message-ID: <2.1992Nov2.043515@AmeriCast.com> Chief Exits, Memories In Tow=BY STEVE TWOMEY= The chief sat Friday afternoon in a darkening office that no longer sported the picture frames of his accomplishments, the plaques of his power, the photos of his encounters, the baseballs caps of his collection. They were boxed and gone or going. In two hours, he would leave 300 Indiana Ave. NW as a civilian. That morning, he had turned in his gun. He had turned in his badges, one his regular, the other his ceremonial. After 28 years with a District cop's shield either in his pocket when off duty or on his uniform, he felt naked. He thought: "Jesus, I'm not the police anymore." All day, people had been saying goodbye. On the street, "People blew their horns and hollered out, you know, 'You shouldn't leave!' " Street cops had come to see him. Suburbanites had called, for goodness sake, people he had never met, who probably never saw him except on the tube at 11 p.m., standing near the covered corpse of a bullet-riddled statistic. "It's been a pretty emotional day," Isaac Fulwood Jr. said. "You never know how people really feel about you until . . . they can say what they feel without there being any sense that they have to say it." In other words, they're no longer sucking up. A funny thought tumbled into the eerie silence of his fifth-floor domain. During these years on the force, he said, he had gotten up each day and never had to think about what to wear. Now, at the age of 52, he would have to make that decision, because he wouldn't be pulling on a uniform. "It's been a very emotional day," he said again. Critiqued from the outside, Fulwood's years as chief of the Metropolitan Police Department would hardly seem cause for the kudos he's been get- ting. In 1989, the year he was named chief, 439 human beings were slaughtered. In 1990, 483. In 1991, 489. This year, the city is closing on 400, with two months left. The killing is a national disgrace. No, an international one. Last month, in a tiny village in deepest France, a local resident asked a traveler from the Washington area what it was like to live with all the shooting and death. And on Capitol Hill, home of the out-of-town masters, the cry has gone up that District leaders are violence tolerant. But no chief could have stanched the blood. Name a big city where one has. Fulwood might have done this or initiated that, but the killings are stoked by madness and indifference beyond law enforcement's deterrent power. Few doubt Fulwood tried to do what he could. Even so, he had always said that if he couldn't get the homicide rate down, he'd leave. And so Friday he did, in an acceptance of responsibility of the sort that has all but vanished from the country's leadership class. Although the homicide rate is not the only reason he's going - he won't say so, but he never warmed to Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly - it's clear the homicide rate toyed with his sanity. His own eyes saw the dead. "One thing people in Washington, D.C., will say about me is that I was there," he said, meaning on the street. Something odd happened to him, he said. Often, as time passes, a callus overlays a cop's emotions. The more he sees, the less he sees. Fulwood said the reverse happened to him. He remembered that in his first year, an officer named Eugene Williams was killed in the line of duty. "I did not cry," he said. "I did not shed a tear. I felt pain, but I believed that policemen did not cry. That would not even cross my consciousness today." He proudly cries now. Calculated? I think not. He is a genuinely emotional man. He is known for toughness. He is known for an acute racial radar that scans his environment seeking incoming prejudice. He is also known for feelings that cruise right on the surface. You don't have to guess whether he's sensing nostalgia, pain, wistfulness, happiness, anger. He'll tell you. "I've spent an awful lot of time today thinking about my family," he said. On the last day, you'd expect him to think about cop stuff. But it was family. Perhaps as he was losing his professional identi- ty, he was reaching out to his personal one. "My family has al- ways been there," he said, "no matter what happens to me. When I'm home, I'm not the chief. I'm Dad and Ike." He was thinking about golf too. He has a new set of Ping clubs and, now, more time. But he was reeling in his years on the job as well, remembering the presidents he met, remembering Mikhail Gorbachev, remembering a wisp of a kid shot dead in an alley not far from Fulwood's own home. The best event, though, is one only he marked. "I suppose that when I made sergeant, that was a tremendous mo- ment for me," he said. It was 1971. "We didn't have a ceremony or anything," Fulwood said. "On a Thursday, they called and said you're going to be promoted, ef- fective Sunday, go over and pick up your badge, and I went over and picked up my badge . . . . It is your first promotion, when you go from being an officer to being a supervisor." There was one other reason to be proud of it back then: "There weren't a lot of African Americans being promoted." Even now, he can't believe he rose to chief. But that's over now. He's going to head the mayor's youth initiative program, working to steer kids away from violence rather than cleaning up after it. "I've seen a lot of kids die," he said. Seven people are finalists for his old job. You wonder why anyone would want it. 02:03 11-02C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. This story is from the Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar- chived or redistributed. For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor- poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)