Lisa Reisman Photo
David Daniels at author talk at Stetson Library.
The Sunday, Aug. 21, 1994, edition of the Connecticut Post pictures a young Black man in police blues holding a hangman’s noose. The man was David Daniels, a police officer. The noose was left on his patrol car.
David Daniels' "Black & Blue in Bridgeport."
“My story is the story of too many Black men,” Daniels said at an author talk for his autobiography “Black & Blue in Bridgeport,” which has on its cover the newspaper photo.
The talk took place Wednesday evening at Stetson Branch Library, part of its slate of events celebrating Black History Month.
Daniels, 68, grew up with five brothers and sisters and a single mother in a two-bedroom apartment in the P.T. Barnum housing project in Bridgeport.
“Living there, I never saw any cops or firemen that were Black,” Daniels told the rapt audience of 20.
“There was no such thing as protect and serve back then,” he said. The rare times firemen came out to the projects — “P.T. was fireproof because it was all brick” — he recalled them “going into somebody’s house and wetting up the whole house and standing outside and laughing about it.”
Still, he fostered a dream of becoming a cop. His father was an alcoholic. “He would abuse my mom to a degree and turn our house upside down, and the only people that could control my dad were the cops,” he said. “And when that happened, a cop would come into my house and tell the strongest person I knew in the world to leave his house, and he wouldn’t even argue.”
Daniels worked at SNET in Bridgeport for some years, becoming a Bridgeport police officer in 1988 despite the protests of his first wife. She told him he would die on the job. “That never dawned on me,” he said. “I had a TV view, a romantic view, of cops. I would put drug dealers in jail. I would get cats out of trees.”
Daniels described his first months on the job as intense and stressful, fielding upwards of a thousand calls for service every eight-hour shift and, along with other cops, sleeping in his car in a graveyard while working the midnight to 8 a.m. shift until a call came in.
Then, on Nov. 15, 1988, about four months into his tenure, he witnessed a cop beating two young suspects in handcuffs. He brought it to the attention of police brass.
“That changed the trajectory of my life and my career,” he said. “Nobody would talk to me. Nobody wanted to ride with me or back me up on calls.”
Other officers jammed the frequency of his radio so he couldn’t get through. One night he found his windshield covered in spit. Another time there were dents and its headlights smashed.
Then came the noose on his car.
That was when Ted Meekins, founder of the Bridgeport Guardians, a fraternal organization representing Black and Latino police officers, stepped in. He convinced Daniels to request a transfer off the street. “I asked to be put somewhere I could work with kids,” he said. He was placed in the community services division.
“I loved it,” he said of his years leading D.A.R.E., a drug youth education program, in public and parochial schools. He organized block watches, led food drives and toy giveaways, took kids to jail to talk to inmates. Becoming known as “Officer Friendly,” he created the Officer Friendly Basketball Camp, a two-week program for inner city and at-risk youth ages 11 to 15.
Daniels, who retired in 2014, said he’s hopeful that, with technology like body cameras and legislation like the 2020 Police Accountability Act, things will improve.
“If there was a suspect acting up, Black cops couldn’t get rough with them because we never knew if the department would back us,” he said. “Now there are the cameras and they don’t lie.”
Toward the end of the talk, Bobby Taylor, an audience member, detailed the ill treatment he endured and the trauma he suffered as a medic for Bridgeport ambulance and then as an officer at the Bridgeport Correctional Center.
“I want a copy of the book because that’s my book. You told my story,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.