A White Officer Shoots a Black Colleague, Deepening a Racial Divide
Milton Green was in the driveway of his home on St. Louis's North Side one night when he suddenly found the barrel of a gun pointed in his direction. Right away, his police training kicked in: He pulled a badge from beneath his T-shirt and grabbed ahold of his service weapon, a 9-millimeter Beretta.
"Police! Put the gun down!" Mr. Green shouted to the man with the gun, who had been fleeing the police when the car he was riding in crashed in front of Mr. Green's red brick bungalow.
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On the night Mr. Green was shot, he said, he did what he thought he had to: He sprang into action when he saw an armed man on the run. As he confronted the suspect, though, he heard someone order him to drop his weapon. Mr. Green tossed down his gun and belly-flopped onto the grass. A white detective recognized him a few moments later and warned the others that Mr. Green was a police officer, too.
Mr. Green got up and ambled toward the detective who knew him, his gun pointed down in his right hand. He held out his badge so there would be no confusion. He had grown up on the city's North Side and had been stopped plenty of times by the police for no good reason before he had gotten his badge, he said.
He took a few steps and then again heard a voice yell for him to drop his weapon, followed almost immediately, he said, by a gunshot. He clutched his right forearm and looked over at the white officer who had shot him.
"Man, you done shot me," Mr. Green recalled saying before blood started spouting from his arm. He became weak and dropped to his knees.
Opinions in the department have been split over an encounter that happened a few months after Mr. Green was shot: A black officer working undercover at a protest was beaten by white officers so badly that the injured officer told a commander, using an expletive, that they beat him "like Rodney King."