looking up. Kosala is a beefy Polish guy, over six foot and 220 pounds, but at moments like this he’s positively light on his feet. Up he goes, ready to grab the rail if a step is booby trapped, moving like lightning. He spins—there’s a figure silhouetted against the window— 

It’s a dummy. Old clothes stuffed with pillows and propped up on a chair. It’s a final little flip of the finger from Baby Doc’s runners.

Down in the alley, the defeated team regroups, and Kosala drags out the dummy. He throws it on the ground and the squad proceeds to stomp it to death, pounding and kicking it until the stuffing is floating in the wind. For good measure, Kosala pulls out his .357 and puts a hole in the thing.

A few minutes later the squad is on the way back to the station heading west on Foster Avenue when the guys in the lead car spot something. They sweep across the left lane and screech to a halt. There, pinned in the headlights, half a dozen black teenagers are frozen in their tracks. The other cars slam on the brakes and suddenly the street is crawling with cops. In a flash the kids—four boys, two girls, the oldest maybe 17—are spread-eagled and braced against the wall. One of the cops recognizes the 15-year-old with the backwards cap. He pulls him out of the lineup and tells him to empty his shoes. Sitting on the curb, the kid pulls off his sneakers, and the cop says, “Dump ‘em!” Nothing there.  “Take off your socks!”

These teenagers fit the profile so perfectly that it’s impossible to believe they’re not carrying anything. For ten minutes the cops pepper them with questions and pat them down, empty their pockets, and rain a constant stream of insults. “What’s a girl like you doing with a piece of shit like this?” “Listen, stupid, I told you, dump your fucking socks.” But the search turns up only an unused plastic baggie. Disgusted, they let everybody go but the barefoot 15-year old sitting on the curb. They search him again.

It would be easy to chalk off this kind of abuse to racism, but the team happens to include an Oriental, a Mexican, and a