Justice For All: Long
out of the closet,
he battles bias
crimes
BY KATHLEEN O'BRIEN,
Star-Ledger online, Sunday, May 20, 2007
He can still remember what they were
having for supper that night: pork chops, mashed potatoes and apple sauce.
He was 5 years old, sitting on the parlor floor watching "Batman" with his
grandmother, when they heard his grandfather's Buick Skylark pull into the
driveway.
His grandmother froze in fear: The pork chops weren't done. Supper
would not be ready when her husband walked through the door.
She knew, bitterly, instinctively, what that meant. Little Dave D'Amico
did not.
But he quickly found out, as he watched the beloved grandfather who helped raise
him first yell, then beat his grandmother. When the slaps weren't enough,
Grandpa grabbed a tabletop rotary phone and started bashing his wife about the
shoulders and head.
Suddenly the front door swung open. In strode a South Plainfield
policeman: light blue shirt, dark blue pants, classic eight-point hat,
badge, gun, baton. The officer wrenched the phone away from his
grandfather.
"Batman" still flickered, unwatched, on the television. Yet right before
the boy's eyes was a real live hero.
Career decision made
At that moment 32 years ago, Dave D'Amico decided he would grow up to be a cop.
Forget Career Day. Skip the vocational counseling. Cancel the
aptitude tests. A lifelong decision had been made, unwaveringly.
So deeply rooted was this decision that, when he hit puberty and realized he was
gay, it had no bearing on his career plans. During his final year of high
school, he worked at Kmart, first as a cashier, but quickly moving to security
guard.
Anxious to start his life's work in law enforcement, he skipped college and took
the first job offered to him: corrections officer at the Adult Diagnostic
and Treatment Center in Avenel -- the prison for sex offenders.
He worked there a year, finding it fulfilling work. As a wary newcomer, he
stayed in the closet. It was 1990 -- gays were out, certainly, but
President Clinton had just learned the hard way that gays in the military
remained a hot-button issue. Was the paramilitary world of law enforcement
any different? D'Amico had no desire to find out.
Then, one day at lunch, a guard pointed to an effeminate inmate in the hallway
and said, "That's why God created AIDS. All fags are going to die, just
like that one." Everybody laughed and resumed eating.
Everybody but D'Amico, who was not only shocked by the cruelty of the comment,
but plunged into a secret turmoil: Did this mean his buddies would reject
him if they knew? If they ever found out, would he be ostracized?
Worse yet, would they fail to protect him if he were in danger?
As a corrections officer -- who patrolled unarmed, relying mostly on people
skills as his first line of defense -- this was no abstract fear.
Absolutely furious, he left at the end of his shift, determined never to return.
"I had quit -- but they didn't know I'd quit," he said. He bolted for
Puerto Rico, where he contemplated his career options. Teaching was the
only other job that appealed to him, but he lacked a college degree.
Checking his messages, he heard his boss threatening to fire him if he didn't
return by Monday. This was unacceptable; he wanted to make sure he quit
before they had the chance to fire him. He returned to the jail, marched
into Chief John Swal's office and turned in his badge.
The puzzled Swal asked why. D'Amico -- still ablaze with anger -- told him
about the AIDS remark, and blurted out that he was gay. To his surprise,
the chief -- an old-school type -- said firmly, "That will never happen in my
jail again."
A few hours later, his resignation rescinded, D'Amico stood in front of 60
guards at the afternoon shift's roll call and came out. He had no script,
just an announcement of truth. He was all of 19.
"There was a stunned silence, then somebody shouted, 'Yeah? So what!' and
it kind of broke the silence," said Cathy Buchanan, a former co-worker now at
the N.J. Department of Corrections Training Academy in Sea Girt. "Nobody
could say one bad thing about him as a corrections officer, so when he made the
announcement, nobody really cared."
Many praised him for his courage; a few couldn't be as accepting. One
lieutenant spent an eight-hour shift reading Bible verses to him and calling him
"an abomination."
"The next day, it was, 'How's your fag friend?' from the guys on the other
shift," said Buchanan. "Cops can be like that. They can totally be
like that."
The real surprise came from the inmates, all sex offenders. "We've got
your back, D,'" some of them said, and D'Amico realized they perceived the
greater threat to him came from his fellow guards. (They even told him of
other officers they suspected were gay but hiding it.)
After that, it was back to work: Another 5 1/2 years at Avenel, then a
switch to the Asbury Park Police Department, where he eventually became a
detective. There, he handled everything from bad checks to homicides.
On 9/11, he arrived at Ground Zero by 1 p.m. and helped for the next 24 hours.
Along the way, he inevitably got stuck with being known as "the gay cop," a term
that continues to annoy him. "I was a good cop, and now I was 'the gay
cop.' Yet they never called my partner 'the straight cop,'" he says.
"I'm a cop who is gay."
Yet he hasn't shied away from activism. He has been a fixture at the
annual Jersey Pride parade in Asbury Park, whether it was escorting political
dignitaries or addressing the crowd, said Laura Pople, president of Jersey Pride
Inc.
"He was a perfect partner for that," she said, adding that he was always
interested in forging ties between the gay community and law enforcement -- two
groups that can have their misconceptions about each other.
Given his innate sense of justice, it makes sense to her that D'Amico ended up
in law enforcement. "At their core, they're the guardians of the
community, right? They're our protectors. So it's a perfect match
for Dave," she says.
With a baritone voice so deep he could announce the starting lineup at Yankee
Stadium, and a typical jar-head buzz cut, he comes across as every bit the cop.
Yet he can fret about regaining some of the weight he lost last year when he and
the office ladies went on Weight Watchers together. He's the rare cop who
can actually joke about doughnuts.
While policing often places him in contact with the darker side of human nature,
D'Amico, 37, is innately cheerful, funny and energetic. One friend likens
him to a Chihuahua -- constantly active.
Coming out early may have had its benefits. It made him more confident,
said Buchanan, and even more compassionate. He instinctively grasped the
emotional damage inflicted on victims of crime -- particularly the bias
incidents that others might try to brush off.
So when the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office had an opening in its Bias
Crimes and Community Relations Unit, D'Amico applied. He was hired in 2002
to prosecute bias crimes and to lecture on the topic to schools, educators and
colleges. He also trains police and corrections recruits.
Part of that job is to convince all parts of the community that it is worth
their while to report bias crimes, said Luis Valentin, the Monmouth County
prosecutor. D'Amico was instrumental in prosecuting a recent case in which
two Latino restaurant workers were assaulted on their way to work.
"He has this ability to talk to people and get them to believe law enforcement
is here to help," said Valentin.
The job means D'Amico, of Toms River, is a combination of the only two things he
ever wanted to be: a cop and a teacher.
And he's a good teacher -- equal parts Baptist preacher, drill sergeant and
sociologist -- giving young recruits a tour of the scalding world of hate
crimes. Nothing was out of bounds in one recent session: not the
f-word or the n-word or any other word from that all-American buffet of ethnic
slurs.
He covers the recruits' legal obligations for spotting and handling bias crimes
and incidents, and explains how such cases can spiral out of control once
advocacy groups and the media show up.
"When you take that oath on June 6, you take an oath to protect all citizens --
not just the ones that look like you or that have the same religion as you," he
told a recent class of future police officers. He cautions the young men
to watch their own speech, even in private, telling them about the three
recruits who got in trouble after a gay judge complained they had made anti-gay
wisecracks in the men's room.
Towards the close of the all-day class, D'Amico shows autopsy photographs of
James Byrd Jr., the African-American man who was dragged to death by whites in a
pick-up truck in Jasper, Texas.
The photos elicit a battle between curiosity and stomach-churning revulsion, as
one confronts the astounding damage done to a human body by three miles of
pavement. (Those images alone once caused an earlier recruit to flee,
deciding he wasn't cut out for a career in law enforcement.)
If one picture is worth a thousand words, these would each count for a million
-- yet D'Amico piles it on. The cheerful Dave, the joking Dave, is gone.
His shirt cuffs rolled up, his deep voice booms the particulars, dwelling on
every indignity of asphalt versus flesh.
It could be considered a bravura performance were it not for the red blotches
that creep into his cheeks. To get his students to take hate seriously,
they must see how it ends, see where hate can take people. It's almost as
if he has had to stick his finger into the electrical socket of hate to let it
channel through him to them.
Only after the photos are over does he add his own quiet coda: He knows
what it's like to be the victim of bias because he's gay.
"I know what you're thinking: I'm not effeminate, I don't have a lisp, I'm
not an airline steward, I'm not a florist," he says. "But I know what it's
like to hear my peers call me a fag behind my back."
"It never fails that this is their favorite class," says Craig Conway, a
long-time D'Amico friend and director of training at the Department of
Corrections Training Academy. "Whenever he comes here, if you walk around
with him, all the trainees greet him like he's their best friend. No
matter where we go, everybody knows him. He's adored no matter where we
go. Really, that's the word: adored."
When off-duty, he takes college courses at Fairleigh Dickinson University
(through its satellite campus or online offerings) to get that degree he skipped
when he went to work at Avenel. He is aiming for a master's in public
administration.
He has been in a "serious dating relationship" with Ron Gonzalez, who works in
the medical profession, for six months now. D'Amico spends his off-duty
time cycling and taking care of his dogs, Rico and JJ.
For several years, he was president of the Jersey chapter of Gay Officers Action
League, marching in pride parades in Jersey, New York and Boston. The
crowd roars when he speaks, Conway said. At this year's parade June 3,
he'll be manning the prosecutor's community outreach booth.
"I've hit the lottery," he says. "I'm doing everything I always wanted to
do."
Hero: His mother
Favorite movie: "Philadelphia"
Pet peeve: Teenagers who casually use the word "gay" to mean stupid or
lame -- and the adults who fail to correct them.
Guilty pleasure: White Castle
Kathleen O'Brien may be reached at
kobrien@starledger.com
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