Opinion | My Grandfather Was a Good Cop. Or Was He?

The subsequent day, 150 protesters gathered outdoors Foremost Liquor. Chants and posters grew into rioting — vehicles rocking, boulders flying. The crowd grew to 1,000 folks, as church officers and civil rights leaders referred to as for peace. In Dixmoor, home windows have been shattered, buying facilities looted and torched, and the police have been referred to as in. More than 200 members of state, native and county regulation enforcement, with tear-gas weapons, German shepherds and hoses, faces coated with plastic visors that appear to be the shields persons are sporting proper now to guard themselves from the coronavirus. The Cook County sheriff, Richard Ogilvie, bullhorned, “If you shoot, we’re going to fire back.”

While reviews say most pictures have been fired within the air, the rioting in Dixmoor raged on and off for 3 days, leading to 37 critical accidents. I maintain my breath as I return to the scrapbook. I’ve seen pictures of fuel masks. An article on Aug. 21, 1964, confirms the Stickney drive had helmets. Headline: “Stickney Ready to Quell Riots.”

But similar to that, the foreshadowing of at present is gone. There is a quick article about my grandfather’s 7-year-old son (my uncle) fracturing his cranium in a bicycle accident. A groom nipped by a horse, a cook dinner deknuckled by a cleaver, a 200-pound youth sending his mom to MacNeal Hospital after injuring her with a frying pan.

I requested my mom if she remembers my grandfather killing anybody or capturing anybody whereas on the job. No, she informed me, although he all the time received excited when he discovered “a stiff.”

Maybe he had a morbid streak. Switchblades, pistols, BB weapons, a pitchfork a person jabbed at his spouse — he saved them in an arsenal within the basement of the Stickney Police Station. He deliberate to dump them within the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

But that doesn’t fulfill my want for solutions I can’t have: for an unequivocal judgment. Twenty years of his tenure as chief are unaccounted for by the scrapbook. Part of me is aware of what I’d see. As Ms. Sedgwick wrote, “Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.”

My grandfather was good, and he wasn’t. He beat his youngsters past adolescence with a horsetail whip. He made them kneel in trays of rice. He cursed in a Cagney jabber, or he sulked, stomping round, not chatting with my grandmother, letting gravy congeal on her bread dumplings. Later, I discovered he cheated on her with an officer’s spouse.