“I don’t think the black community clearly understands how the whole criminal justice system impacts on us,” he says. “So individuals and families struggle with their problems in isolation from one another. We have to stop what’s going on. We have to interrupt the cycle of crime, arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. And it’s got to be done at the community level.”
In the 1980s he headed security for Mayor Harold Washington. He was there when candidate Washington was heckled at a north-side church. He was in the background when Washington lifted his arms on election night in 1983 and said, “You want Harold? Well, you got Harold!” He was with Washington throughout his entire time in office, possibly closer to the mayor than any other person.
As a former cop, Saffold is no bleeding heart. But he’s alarmed by the results of the “punishment syndrome”: Ex-cons, he says, “come back every month by the hundreds. They come back to our communities homeless and jobless, far worse than when they went in. They come back as predators. They wreak havoc.”
Saffold recalls his father DeWitt, who died in 1987, as a “disciplined, high-principled man who never cussed and rarely complained,” though he had severe health problems. DeWitt expected his seven children to pull their own weight, and Howard–the middle child–has had income-producing jobs almost as long as he can remember: delivering papers, selling cosmetics door-to-door, working in a factory from 4 PM to midnight while he was in high school. His parents separated when Howard was 18, and he was one of three children who moved with their father from the near north side to Douglas Park. Devoted to work, Howard also demonstrated an early proclivity for fighting. He was suspended for a month during his senior year at Farragut High School, and family friends urged him to join the army after graduation.
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He returned to Chicago and settled in with his bride Carol. (The two have been married for 36 years.) Saffold worked for a while as a CTA motorman, took the exam for the Chicago police force, and was hired in 1965. He says he did not go in with any other goals than to make a good living and hold a respectable position. He got a quick education on his first assignment, the Shakespeare District, where he was one of only two black officers. Saffold says he was told he’d be assigned to a patrol car with a different partner every day because the men weren’t anxious to associate with a black; once he learned the ropes he could expect to work in a one-man car. “I lived a pretty isolated life,” he says. Later it was reported that several of his fellow officers at Shakespeare belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
Saffold once almost got himself killed when he tried to flag down a driver who had driven through a red light. The man refused to pull over; he kept driving for several blocks, then pulled up in front of his home with Saffold right behind, his light flashing. Suspecting trouble, Saffold radioed for assistance. Several men got out of the car and hurried into the house, while the driver flatly refused to hand over his license. “He told me, “I don’t have to give you nothin’,”‘ says Saffold, “and just walked away. I said, “You’re under arrest,’ and he resisted.” Saffold wrestled the driver to the ground and put him in a headlock, then realized that several men had emerged from the house and one had a shotgun. Fortunately, another policeman arrived at that instant, pulled his gun, and defused the tension. Saffold cannot prove racism motivated the driver or his companions. What he knows is that this aggregation of whites felt less than intimidated by a black officer. The driver was charged with running a light, failure to have a license, resisting arrest, and battery against a police officer. Yet when the case got to court he was found guilty only of not producing a license, fined $25, and released. Saffold says he later learned the man was the nephew of a local ward official.
