She's Used to Gunshots

“How you doing out there?”

“Just fine, Chief,” he says, beaming, clearly recognizing her. “You’re doing a great job!”

“You too,” she says. “Be safe on that bike, now. Have a good one.”

“That’s a dedicated, hardworking man,” Lanier says approvingly as she raises the window back up. “Freezing cold, but he’s out there, doing deliveries. Good work ethic.”

By the time I joined tonight’s caravan, Lanier had already been riding around the city for several hours. Turning around from the front seat to talk to me, she explains why she feels AHOD is such an important night for her troops. “I want them to go out, meet people, engage them. If you treat people respectfully, they’ll care about you. I want to get [recruits] out of that military, police academy training. Because the mentality has always been that in the roughest areas, people hate police. And that’s not true.”

Earlier, while visiting another of D.C.’s bleaker neighborhoods, Lanier witnessed a scene that in her view illustrates how people really feel about cops: “We got out of the car. I had a line of recruits behind me, and five women came out, screaming, ‘We love you, Chief.’ One started crying—‘You saved me! You locked me up, I got my life together, stopped using drugs.’ ”

“People love us,” Lanier insists. “I looked at the cops when I was walking away—‘You don’t think community policing works? Is there any doubt in your mind?’ Then I told the women, ‘Now, I want you ladies to look out for these babies when they come out here.’ ” She says the women assured her they would.

Lanier has certainly won Sheila’s loyalty. And the chief speaks of her friend with frank admiration. “She’s been a caretaker her whole life,” Lanier says. “She took care of her father when he had a stroke; then her sister died and she took in her children, bringing them up along with her own.” Now there are grandkids, as well: Six children are living with her at present. Sheila’s only 42, a year older than the chief, who feels a special connection with women raising children on their own. She knows how that works.