Alex William and the Crossover Strategy; Prince George's County's first black state's attorney has seen the political future-and it's colorblind
An off-duty, black D.C. police officer arrived at his home in Prince George's County to find signs of a burglary. Moving from room to room in the twilight, he began searching for an intruder. Suddenly, from outside in the yard, a white Prince George's County policeman yelled, "Freeze!" Inside, the black policeman spun and lowered his hands as if to fire a gun. The county policeman fired through an open window and the bullet hit the black man in the chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene.</br></br>The shot, fired at 6:40 p.m. on Dec. 14, 1987, echoed throughout Prince George's, a county with a bitter history of accusations of police brutality against blacks. Alex Williams was on his way home when the phone rang in his car. As he listened to an aide recount the details, he began to squint his eyes and tighten his lips. "All these emotions came over me," he remembers. " `Oh, my goodness,' I thought. `I've got to deal with this' . . . The black community was up in arms. The rest of the community was watching to see how I was going to handle this . . . It was a lot on me."</br></br>In a county that has seen its black population triple in less than two decades, the case became a test of Alex Williams' political strategy. Williams, the first black chief prosecutor in the 300-year history of Prince George's County, had won election by appealing to black and white voters. Could he continue to get support from both groups in such a racially explosive atmosphere no matter how impartial he was?</br></br>Blacks demanded an indictment. The county police department investigated and exonerated the officer. Amid cries of "whitewash," Williams decided to conduct his own probe and appointed an independent investigator. The slain man's family tried to bypass local officials altogether, calling for an inquiry by state authorities.</br></br>In the end, four long months after the slaying, Williams declared it an accident. "We conducted a thorough special investigation and came up with the facts," Williams said. "We looked at every aspect, met with the family, with all the witnesses, did an autopsy and put it to the grand jury. On the surface it looked clearly racial, but as we got into it, it clearly was not racial. It wasn't a black and white thing . . . We can justify everything we did and our decision not to charge the officer. There is no justification for criticism."