The new recruits
When Tyrese Davis got accepted into Lincoln University’s police academy, the first of its kind at a historically Black college or university, his instinct was to keep it a secret.
Davis, 22, prides himself on being the first man in his family to go to college, so the acceptance on Jan. 6 was monumental. It meant he was one step closer to building a future for himself amid the economic tumult of the pandemic. But it came after months of civil unrest following the death of George Floyd in police custody, and on the very day insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, where police would turn out to have been on both sides of the law.
As a Black man from Baltimore, where anger remains raw over Freddie Gray’s 2015 death while under arrest, Davis worried about backlash from his community. “I didn’t want to let it be known that I was joining a law-enforcement academy,” he says. “I didn’t want to be frowned upon.”
So on Jan. 19, when the academy opened in Jefferson City, Mo., where Davis lives on campus, he didn’t share the news with his hometown friends, even though he was making history as part of the first police class at an HBCU. But more than a week later, when he learned that authorities in Rochester, N.Y., had handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old Black girl—the latest in a string of high-profile use-of-force incidents—Davis got fed up with hiding his dreams from friends and began posting photos of himself on Facebook wearing body
