Locked Up Inside

A high murder rate wasn't the only challenge when Fulwood was chief. In 1990, Mayor Marion Shepilov Barry Jr. was arrested at a downtown hotel and charged with possession of crack cocaine. He would subsequently receive a six-month prison sentence.

"I remember the evening leading up to Barry's arrest," says Rodney Monroe, a police official under Fulwood and now police chief in Richmond. "He sat quietly in his office the entire day. He was very solemn. But he's a person who's gonna do what's right. I remember afterwards, someone close to the mayor called him a Judas. That really offended him."

Once, when Fulwood was chief, a riot broke out inside Lorton Correctional Facility. (The Virginia penitentiary, which housed inmates from the District, closed in 2001.) Fulwood helicoptered over. "I'm inside the jail, looking around. There are a couple thousand people in there. I swear, they all look black."

After he and his men had Lorton under control, Fulwood took a walk around the place, bullhorn in hand. He heard a voice, a very loud whisper.

"Junior! Junior!"

Fulwood wheeled. He spotted an old family friend from the neighborhood around Kentucky Avenue SE where he grew up. "I said, 'Come here. What you in here for?' He said, 'Robbery.' "

The man asked Fulwood to visit his mother, tell her he was all right, which Fulwood did.

"I looked around that prison and said, 'What a waste of human life,' " Fulwood recalls. "I came home and said to my wife, 'Why can't we break this cycle?' It's still a question I'm always struggling with."

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On Aug. 5, 1973, Kenneth Patrick, a 40-year-old Park Service ranger, was at Point Reyes National Seashore outside San Francisco looking for deer poachers. According to the authorities, Veronza Bowers, Alan Veale and Jonathan Shoher had entered the park, armed with crossbows, to hunt deer. At some point they retreated to their Pontiac in a remote part of the park to sleep. Patrick, spotting the car, walked up to it and flicked on his flashlight. Someone fired a gun and Patrick was killed. Veale would sign a confession stating that Bowers fired the fatal shots into Patrick's chest with a 9mm handgun. Bowers, who denied involvement, would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Patrick left behind a wife and three young sons.

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A man who now spends his time trying to juggle crime and the attendant punishments watched Hurricane Katrina unfold. To him, it was a bad dream: "An awful lot of whites are in denial in this country about race," Fulwood says. "And some blacks are, too -- the Clarence Thomas believers. To his credit, President Bush, after Katrina, said race is a problem -- and we gotta do something about it. Katrina lifted the blanket and made nerves raw. Most reasonable people saw the conditions down there and were offended. The level of anger didn't start subsiding until the president went down there. To his credit, he said, 'This is not acceptable.' "