4. HuffPost: Baltimore’s Most Hated Cop and Me
In this piece, which reads as one part personal essay and one part profile, D. Watkins braids together the history of Baltimore with his own biography and that of Daniel T. Hersl, a white cop previously on the disgraced Gun Trace Task Force who is now serving 18 years in federal prison for robbing citizens, racketeering, and numerous other charges. Watkins “was raised in the crack era,” he writes. “I learned to cook up, package and slang crack in and around a city that was occupied by a militarized police force that harassed everybody, even the non-crack slangers.”
It would be easy to assume that Watkins would have ended up in jail, and Hersl a police captain. As Watkins “continued to try to make sense of my own life through writing, I started looking at Hersl more closely. I didn’t think he was a victim—I wasn’t a victim either—but I did start to think more about the failed drug war and the reasons why we both played a game that cost him his freedom, and could’ve cost me mine. I’ve always said that people needed to understand my environment before judging my past as a dope dealer. Didn’t I owe the same thing to him?” Here’s what happened when, as Watkins writes, “Everything I had going against me, Hersl had going for him.”