I CAME TO this story about one of Ed Norris' trusted commanders before Ed Norris decided to make the dubious career move from Baltimore police commissioner to state police superintendent. The story has little do with Norris and everything to do with Anthony Barksdale, a young major in charge of a special violent-crime unit. I just wanted to know what motivated Barksdale to become a cop in the first place. Tom Newman, a detective Barksdale knew well, had just been killed execution-style, so I thought it would be an appropriate time to ask why a man seeks this dangerous job.
"I want to be there," Barksdale answered. "That's what I want -- I want to be there for you. If I could get there, if I could just be there for you, I will. That's what it is for me."
He wishes he could have been there for Lamont Rivers.
You can see Tony Barksdale in a Sun photograph taken 13 years ago, the day after the foolish shooting death of Rivers, one of his friends from teen years. The madness happened on Govane Avenue, just east of York Road, in September 1989. A cab driver nearly struck Rivers and two other young men as they walked in the street. They yelled at the cabbie. The cabbie stopped, got out of his car and started arguing with the young men. Police said he pulled a .357 Magnum and fired several shots. One struck Rivers, who was 18 years old and, in an instant, another victim in Baltimore's long epoch of violence.
The next day, there was mourning in the street -- a large crowd of young people who knew and liked Rivers, and an array of spray-painted messages on the pavement where he fell. Within the crime lab's outline of River's body someone painted a tulip. Tony Barksdale was deeply shaken by his peer's death.
He walked to the spot where Rivers had been shot the night before and bowed his head. He did not know Sun photographer Karl Merton Ferron had snapped his picture until it appeared in print the next day.
"Lamont [Rivers] was someone I knew and liked -- he said he wanted to be a Marine -- and he was gone," Barksdale said. "It hit me that day that [violence] can happen to nice people, to a good guy."
And had he been there, he might have been able to save Rivers -- with words that might have defused the argument.
The thought hits him each time Barksdale drives to his mother's house and passes the spot where his friend died.
It reminds him of the reasons he became a cop a few years later, after attending Coppin State College, and why now, as the 31-year-old chief of an 82-member unit known as the Firearms Apprehension Strike Team, he seems to have more passion for the job than ever. He loves to work the streets with his men, and with FAST, a kind of special forces unit of the BCPD, he has a chance to "be there," on the front lines of the city's efforts to reduce gun violence in its toughest neighborhoods.
The FAST unit has seized 557 handguns and made more than 2,500 felony drug arrests this year. It was involved in the raid of a major East Coast PCP lab in Northwest Baltimore last month. Barksdale's team has a lot of freedom to pursue violent criminals, and its early effectiveness should help FAST survive Norris' departure.
"I used to be assigned to [Norris' personal] detail, and we had to go to every homicide -- every homicide -- and report to the commissioner," Barksdale said. "We went to two the first night -- two kids, 17 or 18 years old, shot in the head. ... I've talked to some killers. I've interviewed them. ... I've seen and heard enough for me to say we are at war. We are in a fight. So I say, 'Let's fight them for the streets.'"
The senseless death of young Rivers in 1989 got Barksdale thinking about all this. There was an old man who influenced him, too.
"My grandfather [the late postal worker, Delhi Thweatt] lived at 1905 W. Saratoga St., and when I told him I was going to be a cop, he said, 'Good. Those rascals out here -- something has to be done about them.' I used to pick him up a Filet-o-Fish, french fries, orange soda and an apple pie, and go over there and sit with him. I was moving into an apartment and wanted him to move in with me. But he wasn't packing up. He wouldn't leave his house. 'I'm not going anywhere,' he said. 'I'm staying right here.'"
And so the grandson stays -- to fight with other cops along Baltimore's most dangerous fronts, out where the future of the city is being decided day by day, in little skirmishes, in big busts, one block here, one block there. Tony Barksdale is out there, and it's where he always wanted to be.