Patrick Skinner

A Reporter at Large May 7, 2018 Issue The Spy Who Came Home Why an expert in counterterrorism became a beat cop.  By Ben Taub

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home

It often falls to the police to handle what Skinner calls “the social work of last resort.” One night, as the temperature dropped into the twenties, he spotted a person in dark clothing skulking through an empty parking lot, near the site of a recent unsolved robbery. He pulled into the lot, and as he got closer his headlights illuminated an aging black woman with a sunken face, wearing a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket. “You doing O.K.?” Skinner asked.

“I was trying to get to Walgreens,” she said. She looked at the ground and spoke slowly, in subdued, raspy tones. “Everybody mad at me,” she said.

“They’re not too mad at you, are they?” Skinner said.

“They say I’m a troublemaker.”

“You’re not a troublemaker. What’s your first name?”

“Norma Jeane.” She was too cold to make it to the Walgreens, she said, and so Skinner told her to hop in the car. After he closed the windows and turned up the heat, Norma Jeane lit up. “I’m named after Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I’m gonna be a superstar.”

She launched into tales from her past, with characters and events entering and vanishing from her story as spontaneously, it seemed, as they had in her life. As a young child, she said, “I took my brothers with me, and we got baptized” at a church on May Street, just north of Cuyler-Brownsville. “They say, ‘Where are your parents?’ And I said, ‘They’re both alcoholics.’ ” The rest was a chronological blur, a half century of hardship, arguments, scarcity, and violence. As we approached Walgreens, the McDonald’s next door caught her attention.

Skinner asked if she was hungry, and she asked if he would get her some pancakes and sausages, since she hadn’t eaten all day. Skinner pulled into the drive-through. “If I sit down, it hurts,” Norma Jeane said. “Feels like I got polio. That’s why I keep walking. I know how to walk, and I ain’t scared. I never been scared. I been walking these streets since I was five.”

When Norma Jeane mentioned that someone had once given her a calico cat, Skinner asked for its name.

“I didn’t know no better name than Calico,” Norma Jeane said.

“That’s awesome—I have an orange cat named Orangey,” Skinner replied. “He’s so mean, though. I usually just call him Mean Cat.”

“Oh, boy, I love cats! I turn cats into dogs,” Norma Jeane said.

Norma Jeane carried a wooden cane and a black handbag, in which she kept her Bible, an empty pickle jar that she used as a wallet, a cracked cell phone with no battery, a magnifying glass, and an old bottle for Seroquel, an antipsychotic medication used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She said that the pills made her sleepy, so she’d stopped taking them long ago. She also has diabetes, but she couldn’t afford health insurance or treatment. “I haven’t taken insulin in three years,” she said.

Norma Jeane’s food arrived. It cost a little more than six dollars. Skinner paid with a twenty and put the change in Norma Jeane’s pickle jar. “I wish I could have a dill pickle, but I ain’t got my teeth on,” she said. “I love them Hot Mama pickles, sour pickles . . .” She trailed off.

“Where are you gonna spend tonight?” Skinner asked.

“I could go—what time is it?”

“It’s two-forty-one in the morning.”

“I’m trying to think,” she said. “I got to go where it’s clean. You know someplace I can go?” As a warm city in the Deep South, Savannah attracts many homeless people, but its overcrowded shelters had locked their doors around dusk. “I need to go to a Waffle House,” she concluded. “It’s open twenty-four hours. I’ll go in there and play the jukebox.”

Skinner notified the precinct of the plan, and pulled into the Waffle House parking lot, on Abercorn Street. Norma Jeane walked over to a booth in the corner. Then she took off her Santa hat and started messing up her hair, pulling strands so that they’d stick out in all directions. “This way, everybody gonna think I’m crazy,” she said. “No one gonna come up to me, this way. No one gonna hurt me.”

Back in the car, Skinner explained that part of his motivation in helping Norma Jeane was to prevent an emergency call, three hours later, of a homeless woman freezing to death. “Think of all the shit that went wrong in this country for Norma Jeane to be sitting in the car with us,” he said. Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”

“A huge amount of what police actually do is support and service and problem-solving,” David M. Kennedy told me. “And part of what’s so inside out is that most of that activity is not recognized.” Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”

Twenty-seven hours after we left Norma Jeane at the Waffle House, another cop radioed in an E.M.S. call. A fifty-nine-year-old homeless woman, dressed in a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket, was freezing to death.

In February, Skinner began a permanent beat, from 2:30 P.M. to 11 P.M. Residents have begun to get used to him. In March, during a foot chase in Cuyler-Brownsville, two women—one of whom he’d put in handcuffs the previous week—started cheering for him from their porches. “Go, Skinner, go!” they shouted, laughing. He’d lost sight of the suspect by then, and asked if a young man had just run past. On a block where the police never get tips, the women helped him narrow the search.

One recent Saturday night, two drunk men sitting in a park waved Skinner over. One of the men was trying to console his friend Kenneth, whose girlfriend had kicked him out and taken away his car keys. Suddenly, Kenneth stood up and reached for Skinner, to embrace him. Skinner hugged back.

A few minutes later, Skinner described the scene to an officer-in-training. She was aghast. At the police academy, cops are trained how to position their bodies when interacting with members of the public—one shoulder forward, gun hip always out of reach.

“I know—I lost tactical advantage,” Skinner told her.

“Yeah!” the trainee said.

Skinner smiled. “I’m not looking for tactical,” he said. “I’m looking for strategic.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 7, 2018, issue.

Ben Taub, a staff writer, is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.