More than a century before Albert Einstein revolutionized physics with his theory of general relativity, and nearly two centuries before astronomers accepted the existence of black holes, an English clergyman and scientist named John Michell proposed a startling idea. In 1783, Michell suggested that some stars might possess such immense gravity that even light could not escape from them. These invisible objects, which he called "dark stars," bear a remarkable resemblance to what we now know as black holes.
Visualisation of a black hole. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Via Polish organization Ordo Iuris:
On September 12–13, the Ukrainian company BioTexCom plans to hold a conference in Warsaw aimed at promoting programs offering surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization. The company is inviting interested parties to individual meetings with its representatives, offering surrogacy packages worth nearly 65,000 euros. Under Polish law—unlike Ukrainian law—surrogacy may be classified as a criminal offense. The matter of the Warsaw conference has already been referred to the prosecutor’s office.
This event is not an isolated episode but another manifestation of a broader phenomenon: Poland, alongside other Western and Central European countries that lack their own surrogacy regulations, has for years been becoming a market for foreign so-called reproductive companies. In this context, it is worth recalling that the issue of surrogacy has for years been a central concern of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law—both at the domestic level and in the most important international forums.
Since 2023, the Institute has regularly submitted opinions and positions to bodies of the United Nations (UN) and institutions of the European Union (EU), consistently arguing that surrogacy meets the definition of human trafficking and the sale of children under international law. In February 2023, Ordo Iuris experts published an analysis showing that European Union law does not require member states to legalize surrogacy. When, in December 2024, the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on trafficking in women and girls that for the first time explicitly addressed the phenomenon of surrogacy, the Ordo Iuris Institute described it as a significant precedent.
This activity intensified significantly in 2025. In April, Ordo Iuris submitted an opinion contributing to a UN thematic report on surrogacy, in July it joined the organizations supporting a position presented to the UN Human Rights Council against the legalization of this practice, and in October and November it submitted further positions—including an extensive opinion, “Surrogacy as a Form of Sale of Children and Violation of Women’s Rights”—addressed directly to the UN Special Rapporteur. The year 2026 brought further action: in January, an opinion for the European Commission calling for every form of surrogacy to be recognized as human trafficking, in March, participation in the session of the Commission on the Status of Women, and in July, a commentary summarizing the UN Human Rights Council’s 62nd session, at which the report on violence against mothers was presented.
A special place in these efforts is occupied by the cooperation with Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who consistently defends the biological understanding of sex and motherhood in her reports. Ordo Iuris took part in informal expert consultations conducted by Alsalem for both of her key documents—the report on violence against women in the context of surrogacy, submitted to the UN General Assembly in October 2025, and the report on violence against mothers, presented to the Human Rights Council in July 2026. Importantly, the Ordo Iuris Institute’s position was explicitly cited in the latter document, in the section addressing the devaluation of motherhood in contemporary public and institutional discourse.
This cooperation also took a direct form: on June 3, 2026, Reem Alsalem personally took part—as a special guest—in the international academic conference “Motherhood in the 21st Century” organized by Ordo Iuris at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University. During the panel devoted to surrogacy, she presented the findings of her report, outlining the profile of women who become surrogates—almost exclusively poor women, often single mothers or immigrants—and calling for a model of surrogacy abolition modeled on the abolition of prostitution. She was accompanied by Olivia Maurel, spokeswoman for the international Casablanca Declaration—a coalition of more than 150 experts from 75 countries advocating a universal ban on surrogacy—who was herself born through the procedure and shared a moving personal testimony.
This is not the first time the paths of Ordo Iuris and the circle surrounding the Casablanca Declaration have crossed. As early as April 2024, the Ordo Iuris Institute took part in an international conference in Rome organized by the Declaration’s initiators, devoted entirely to the issue of surrogacy, and addressed its findings in the commentary “The Right to a Child, or the Rights of the Child?” The participation of the Declaration’s spokeswoman in the Warsaw conference in June 2026 is thus a continuation of many years of ongoing cooperation with this coalition, not an isolated episode.
In its opinions submitted to the UN, the Ordo Iuris Institute consistently puts forward a specific legislative proposal: the adoption of a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that would explicitly prohibit surrogacy. The legal argumentation, developed in particular in the November opinion for the Special Rapporteur, invokes Article 35 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 2(a) of the existing 2000 Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, whose definition of “the sale of children”—in the assessment of Ordo Iuris experts—also covers surrogacy agreements under which a child is transferred in exchange for remuneration or another benefit.
The latest element of this activity is a publication that took place just a few days ago. On August 25, 2026, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published on its official website Polish translations of both of Reem Alsalem’s reports mentioned above—on violence against women in the context of surrogacy and on violence against mothers. Both translations were prepared by the Ordo Iuris Institute. Thanks to this, Polish-speaking lawyers, journalists, public administration officials, and NGOs have gained direct access to the full content of both documents—without relying on the fragmentary quotations and secondary media coverage through which UN reports had until now been known in Polish public discourse.
The actions outlined above—more than a dozen opinions and positions submitted to the UN and the EU, participation in the UN Special Rapporteur’s expert consultations, its own international academic conference in Warsaw, cooperation with the initiators of the Casablanca Declaration, the call for a new international treaty, and the preparation of official translations of UN reports—together form a picture of Ordo Iuris’s systematic, years-long engagement in the fight against surrogacy at both the domestic and international levels. It is against this backdrop that the Ordo Iuris Institute’s opposition to the BioTexCom conference planned for September 12–13 in Warsaw should be understood. The Ordo Iuris Institute has prepared a petition to Poland’s Minister of Justice, Waldemar Żurek, calling for the event to be blocked.
“The conference that the Ukrainian company is planning for September in Warsaw is not a neutral informational event, but a promotional campaign for a commercial reproductive business that treats a woman’s body as a means of production and a child as a product tailored to the client’s expectations.
Polish law does not explicitly criminalize surrogacy, but that does not mean a legal vacuum. An agreement under which a child is handed over in exchange for payment may meet the definition of human trafficking, and organizing and promoting such practices on the territory of the Republic of Poland should meet with a response from the relevant authorities. Ordo Iuris has for years documented the mechanisms of exploitation built into commercial surrogacy: from Colombia, through Ukraine, to the United States—and consistently works to ensure that this problem is no longer treated as the private affair of ‘commissioning parents,’ but is recognized for what it truly is: a form of economic exploitation of women in difficult life circumstances and a violation of a child’s fundamental right to identity and to a bond with the mother who gave birth to them,” notes Julia Książek of the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law.
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Oil prices rose more than 2% Monday after the United States attacked an Iranian island in the Strait of Hormuz and drew retaliation from Tehran, as the six-month-old conflict between the two countries showed no signs of easing. Brent crude futures climbed $2.21, or 2.51%, to $90.31 a barrel as of 0436 GMT. U.S. West ... Read more
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Missile strikes follow a U.S. operation against Iranian launchers near the Strait of Hormuz.
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Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Helen McEntee TD has provided an update on Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, highlighting progress made during its first two months and the Government’s focus on delivering practical results for people, communities and businesses.
Since Ireland assumed the Presidency on 1 July, work has advanced across its three core priorities of competitiveness, values and security.
Early achievements include renewed momentum on EU enlargement, agreement on a further package of sanctions against Russia, progress on measures to better protect children from sexual abuse online, and advancing measures aimed at strengthening Europe’s competitiveness.
Over the coming months, Ireland will lead negotiations and discussions on some of the biggest issues facing Europe, including the next EU budget, reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens on businesses, supporting sustainable and competitive agriculture, strengthening communities and regions through cohesion funding, and improving road safety.
Minister McEntee said: “We began this Presidency with a clear objective: to use Ireland’s six months leading the Council to deliver practical results that make a difference to people’s lives.
“That means making it easier for Irish and European businesses to grow, invest and create jobs. We are committed protecting children online, supporting our farmers and rural communities, strengthening Europe’s security and standing firmly with Ukraine. And we are making every effort to ensure that the European Union remains competitive in a rapidly changing global economy.
“We have made real progress during our first two months. There is a great deal more work ahead of us, but Ireland is now in a strong position to secure important agreements before the end of the year.”
The Presidency meetings programme will return to full pace following the summer period.
On Monday and Tuesday (31 August-1 September), Minister McEntee will host EU Defence Ministers in Co. Wicklow for an informal meeting chaired by the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas.
She will also host EU Foreign Ministers in Wicklow on Tuesday and Wednesday (2 SEptember) for the traditional informal “Gymnich” meeting.
These are among 16 informal meetings of EU Ministers being hosted in Ireland up to the end of November. Ministers will meet across the country to advance work in areas including energy, housing, health, consumer protection, competitiveness and security.
Minister McEntee said: “Measures at a European level have a direct impact here at home. They affect the cost of doing business, the security of our energy supply, the opportunities available to our farmers and exporters, and our ability to respond to challenges such as war, economic instability and technological change.
“The Presidency provides Ireland with an opportunity to shape these decisions and to push for solutions that deliver for people right across Ireland and the EU.
“We are also bringing these meetings beyond Dublin. Communities across Ireland are hosting thousands of visitors during our Presidency and are showcasing all that Ireland has to offer to our European partners.”
The Presidency is also providing opportunities for people across Ireland to engage directly with the European Union and Ireland’s role within it.
Through the Presidency County Pairings Programme, each EU Member State has been paired with an Irish county, with events and initiatives taking place throughout the autumn to strengthen links between communities in Ireland and across Europe.
New resources for schools will also be launched in September, including a children’s version of the Presidency Policy Programme for primary school pupils and a reading guide aimed at Transition Year students.
Minister McEntee said: “EU membership has transformed Ireland. It has helped create jobs and investment, opened opportunities for Irish businesses and our young people, supported our farmers and communities and given Ireland a much stronger voice in the world.
“Our Presidency is an opportunity to bring that European story closer to communities across the country.
“I want people, and especially our young people, to understand that Europe is not something distant that happens in Brussels. The decisions we make together affect our jobs, our economy, our security and the opportunities available to the next generation.
“The Presidency County Pairings Programme and our work with schools are about ensuring that people across Ireland can participate in this Presidency and strengthen the relationships with our European partners that have served Ireland so well.”
Details of the Presidency policy programme, the calendar of Presidency meetings and events, and other updates are available on the Irish Presidency website at www.eire2026.eu and www.ireland2026.eu.
Azan Awais top-scored for Pakistan with 46 runs, while Saud Shakeel made 16.
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For Pakistan, Mohammad Abbas was the standout bowler, taking four wickets.
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America’s elders need more places to live, but even in liberal enclaves that recognize the problem, developers are facing fierce foes: America’s elders. Make it make sense! Charley Locke reports from her hometown of Oakland, California, where boomers are organizing against two proposals that would add 618 market-rate residential units to the city’s senior housing stock:
Many in the crowd had been marching against governmental and corporate overreach for half a century: against the Vietnam draft and the invasion of Iraq; against Wall Street; against police brutality. They’re part of a generational force that’s antiestablishment and suspicious of power. But in this fight, it wasn’t so clear who the establishment was or who had the power. Were these righteous middle-class activists fending off greedy developers who would charge high rents, or were they wealthy seniors prioritizing neighborhood character over ameliorating the housing crisis? Were they once again David, or had they become Goliath?
Polish prosecutors are now investigating a “White Lives Matter” graffiti as a hate crime in the city of Rzeszów, with the suspects facing up to three years in prison if they are apprehended and convicted.
Painted on a wall in the Polish city of Rzeszów, the graffiti was reportedly created as a memorial to the murdered British youth Henry Nowak. Polish police have reportedly secured surveillance footage and referred the case to Polish prosecutors. However, Polish newspaper toRzeszow claims that cameras are not in the direct area where the wall was painted, making it difficult to identify the suspects.
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 25, 2026
Painted on a wall in the Polish city of Rzeszów, the graffiti was reportedly created as a… pic.twitter.com/FP1HYP0cDZ
Authorities also painted over the entire wall.
Major Polish news outlet wPolsce24 has reacted with outrage to the investigation: “The Rzeszów case is part of a broader trend of suppressing the voices of white people who dare to remind them that their lives also have value. When black people say “Black Lives Matter,” it is a fight for equality. When white people say “White Lives Matter,” it is immediately racist.” The news outlet further writes: “The slogan on the garages in Rzeszów was not an expression of hatred. There was a voice reminding us that white lives matters too. And as long as we treat some lives as ‘more equal’ than others, such slogans will appear on walls.”
Meanwhile, authorities claim the graffiti is illegal under article 257 of the Polish penal code, which concerns the public insult of a group of people or an individual based on national, ethnic, or racial identity.
A group labeled “Narodowy Rzeszów” allegedly posted a video of themselves standing next to the graffiti holding a banner and flares and displaying the logo of the right-wing National-Radical Camp (ONR), however, it remains unclear if they sprayed the graffiti themselves. Their post pointed to violence against Whites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Social media platforms took the video down.
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Wilbert L. Cooper | Longreads | August 25, 2026 | 3,848 words (14 minutes)
Excerpted from The Black Shield: An American Memoir of Family and Power by Wilbert L. Cooper. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Wilbert L. Cooper. All rights reserved.
In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.
This excerpt combines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans.
Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.
Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.
It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.
Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.
I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.
Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.
But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.
These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.
So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.
Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.
By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him.
It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”
Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.
Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.
In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.
The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.”
Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.
After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.
The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.
While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.
It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.
“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”
Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.
There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.
“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”
It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”
“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”
It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”
It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.
When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”
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Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.
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