Racism Reversed

But mostly they were known for their speed traps. Their main task, it appeared, was to hunt down unsuspecting motorists. At the time, Woodmere's speed limits on Chagrin Boulevard were dramatically lower than those in the neighboring villages. Conveniently for city coffers, there were no signs advertising the sudden changes. All police had to do was wait at the border and fire up their red lights. By 1993, the village was generating more than $10,000 a month in speeding tickets.

It mattered not to city leaders that its police force was essentially shaking down motorists. When a Bedford judge ruled that 18 drivers had been stopped illegally — and suggested that Woodmere police had lied in court — the village simply ignored the Bedford ruling.

Either way, it wasn't the best way to build a lasting relationship between police and community. When Chief Melvyn Prince crashed his motorcycle, he decided that battling residents over tickets wasn't the best way to spend his life. He left the force permanently.

Broadie, by then a power on the council, believed the department required a makeover. She envisioned the new chief in the spirit of her grandmother — a strict, no-bullshit leader who could whip Woodmere into shape. East Cleveland Lieutenant LaMont Lockhart appeared to be that very person.

Eleven years of working the streets of East Cleveland can weigh heavily on a mind. In the decade Lockhart spent in the bombed-out suburb, he witnessed the kind of things only screenwriters imagine: a dope dealer beaten so hard across the head with an iron skillet that the pan broke into three pieces. An 11-year-old girl, still in school uniform, shot square in the chest by a neighborhood gangbanger. A six-year-old curled on an apartment floor, staring at the cold body of her mother.

Lockhart's walkie-talkie seemed to forever crackle with news of another horror. It got to be too much — especially for Lockhart's wife, who quivered when the phone rang, scared of the news to come. Her husband, after all, had been shot at eight times.

So when a city employee told Lockhart about the chief's opening in Woodmere, he jumped. Sure, he knew of the department's reputation for ineptitude. But he looked forward to rebuilding it. As a teenager, his first real job had been in Woodmere, at Corky and Lenny's deli. Now he would be the village's principal crime-fighter. "It felt like I was coming full circle," he says.

Lockhart thrived in his new job. He won four federal grants, allowing him to buy bulletproof vests and hire more officers. His liquid brown eyes and warm smile quickly won over residents, who'd become accustomed to police merely shaking them down with speeding tickets. "In 38 years, we'd never had a better police chief," says shoe-store owner Leuchtag Howard.

Then Broadie ascended to mayor.

At first she heaped praise on the new chief, bragging up the man who would reform the department. Lockhart felt equally fond of the mayor. "I thought she had good intentions. She seemed to have the community at heart."

Yet it would take only a few months before he revised this thesis. City Hall was small, and Lockhart couldn't help but hear rumors of the mayor's racism. They flew like shrapnel through the office, and Broadie didn't seem eager to disabuse anyone. "This is a black community, and I only want black people working here," officer Mark Ramsey claims she once said. According to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission files, Broadie also allegedly told an assistant, "I can't stand those white yuppies."

At first, Lockhart didn't pay much heed. Though black himself, he never really thought much about skin. In East Cleveland, one didn't have the luxury of reflecting on color. "You had to depend on your staff every day. You couldn't get caught up in that," he says. "In our world, there wasn't black or white. Everyone was blue." Lockhart intended to run his new department the same way.

But it soon became apparent that the mayor had different ideas. If the chief considered color an afterthought, he says, the mayor "tried to put color to everything she did."

Weak management had led to the department's laughingstock reputation. It's why Lockhart wanted to promote Mark Ramsey to sergeant. The 10-year veteran was as sturdy as a suspension bridge. He'd already demonstrated his leadership, running the department when Chief Prince was hospitalized.

All Lockhart needed was the mayor's signature.