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On Oct. 29, 1984, when Ashanti was 11 years old, police officers in Morris Heights entered Eleanor Bumpurs’ apartment and killed her with a shotgun. Bumpurs was 66 and mentally ill. Her family had instructed her not to let strangers into her home, and when the police showed up to assist in her eviction that day, she lunged at them with a kitchen knife. Her death inflamed the city. In Ashanti’s neighborhood — a predominantly Black community of working-class Caribbean immigrants and city employees — the shooting entered a canon of police killings that, over decades, have shaped attitudes on race and the police. Ashanti remembers that this was about the time when his mother first gave him the Talk. “It’s not like she didn’t have respect for authority,” Ashanti says. “It was not that I should dislike the police. It was more like, ‘There are some police officers who will abuse their power, and unless you capitulate, things might escalate.’ She was like, ‘I want my son alive.’ She said that more than once to me.”

Not long after, three Black men whose car had broken down in Howard Beach were chased by a pack of white teenagers with tire irons and baseball bats. One of the men fleeing the mob was struck by a car and killed. Another was savagely beaten. For Ashanti, the takeaway was clear: Don’t ever ride your bike into Howard Beach. “It’s the ironic thing about growing up in New York City, which is such a quote, unquote liberal city,” he says. “You have these incidents of not just police but private racial violence.” Police racism was real, he thought, but cops didn’t have a monopoly on prejudice; it was simply everywhere.

He would have preferred to do civil-rights work on behalf of plaintiffs, but the firms that handled such cases weren’t offering him a job. Plus, for a native New Yorker, joining the Law Department had a special attraction. “Representing the City of New York did fill me with a sense of pride,” he says.

The idea that he’d be arguing the side of the police just wasn’t much of a factor in his decision to join the division, he says. “I didn’t feel any kind of way about representing police officers and correctional officers because I always knew — I always knew — it was all about the work and the cases,” he says. “It’s always a case-by-case situation.”

Special Fed was created in 1998 by the administration of Rudy Giuliani to deal with a surge in lawsuits against police officers, jail guards and prosecutors.

…

Ashanti believed he could be a more nuanced operator at Special Fed.

In a backhanded recognition of that fact, on Friday, March 6, Trump
and his entourage visited the CDC to rally the troops. It was a vintage Trump performance. He sparred with the media, bragged about his high ratings on Fox and the recent stock market highs, and attacked the Democratic governor of Washington State, who was struggling to contain one of
America's worst early outbreaks. Trump then went on to admit that he had not known how many people died every year of the flu. He was impressed. Perhaps to reassure the public, he called to mind his "super genius" uncle, who had been a professor at MIT. Trump suspected that he might have inherited his natural scientific ability. Turning to the actual crisis, he promised "four million testing kits available within a week." The tests were "beautiful." "Anybody that needs a test gets a test." In fact, America's entire test system was in disarray.