And the judge interviewed Renee Diallo once, at the end, in her office, with the deputy chief present and the door open, at his insistence. He asked her only about the afternoon and about the recusal, and she answered in the manner of a witness, not a chief: times, words, the walk from the library, the request for preservation made aloud at the scene. He asked her whether she had, at any time, spoken to any person in the department about the incident's handling outside the recusal's channels. She said she had not, and the deputy chief, who had carried every paper of the matter for three months, confirmed it from the record of his own office. The judge thanked her and left, and on the stairs down he said to his aide the only unrecorded sentence he is known to have produced that summer: she wrote herself out of her own son's case in longhand, before dinner, and never once reached back in — in twenty-three years I have not seen power do that on purpose, and I have seen a great deal of power.
The report was published on a Tuesday in September, in full, on the city's website, with the exhibits attached, in a form any citizen could download and read at a kitchen table — which is where, in the Diallo house, it was read, all eighty-one pages of it, by Moussa first, in one sitting, with a pencil that he did not use. Renee read it the way it had been written to be read by her: through channels, after everyone else, in the copy her office received in the ordinary distribution. She had not seen a draft. She had not been sent one, and the fact that she had not been sent one was, as her deputy observed, the report's first finding, delivered without words.
Its findings were these. The stop itself, on the call as dispatched, was within policy. The detention's continuation without verification was a failure the report assigned carefully: not to malice, but to a sequence — a call that described conduct, officers who followed the description further than the scene supported, and a desk that declined the one step, a supervisor, that the policy had designed to interrupt exactly such momentum. The declination was substantiated against the desk sergeant as a failure of a required duty. Officers Rahman and Brunner were cleared; the report attached to their clearance the sentence that would follow them, in the good way, for years: that the detention ended because one of them re-verified the complaint against the scene, which is what the policy intends every detention to become. The report substantiated nothing against the caller within its charge — her truthfulness was the prosecutor's matter, not the reviewer's — but it printed the dispatch table entire, fourteen rows, because the table was the department's own record, and the department's own record was the report's whole argument: a system that takes calls must have a way of knowing when one voice has used it fourteen times.
The reforms it recommended were two, and they were small enough to be enacted and large enough to matter, which the judge had said, in his cover letter, was the correct size for reforms that are meant to survive. The first concerned dispatch: that in every call reporting a suspicious person, the dispatcher must ask, and the log must record the answer to, a question the script had never contained — what conduct did you actually observe — and that the answer, or the absence of one, travel with the call to the responding officers, so that the difference between a report and a story would be a field in the record and not a veteran's intuition. The second concerned juveniles: that a supervisor be on scene, or on the phone with the detained juvenile's parent or guardian, within fifteen minutes of any juvenile detention, without discretion and without exception, and that the fifteen minutes be logged the way response times are logged, so that the next desk sergeant's handle it would collide with a clock. The city adopted both within the month, by the mayor's order and the council's, and the department's policy manual acquired two new paragraphs in the impersonal prose of manuals, and the training division built a module around a radio recording with the names bleeped and the two fatal words left in, because the desk man's voice, anonymized, had become the most effective instructor the department owned.