Photo: Sgt. White is interviewed for a second time by detectives.
Alicia White was used to smiles in her native West Baltimore, but she was also getting stares. Sometimes strangers would come right up and ask.
“Are you that officer?
To some, she’d demur. Other times the 30-year-old would acknowledge, yes — I’m the female officer charged in Freddie Gray’s death.
For the past 18 months, her co-defendants either went to trial or were called to the stand to testify while she awaited her own trial. Out of public view, White spent much of the time grappling with crippling anxiety, and at one point was rushed to a hospital. The stress led her and her fiance to call off their engagement, and she spent months unemployed. Then, in July, all charges were dropped.
Now, White is speaking publicly for the first time as she begins the process of clearing her name in the community and in the department, where an Internal Affairs investigation is pending. Next, she hopes to return to policing the streets of Baltimore.
“I still believe that, when I went to work that day, I did everything that I was trained to do,” White said in a series of interviews with The Baltimore Sun. “Unfortunately, that day someone lost their life. But I feel like everything I was trained to do, I did.”
She had never been suspended by the Police Department for anything prior to the Gray case.
Her attorney, Ivan Bates, said White’s interaction with Gray lasted all of 15 to 20 seconds, and suggests she may have been swept up with the other charged officers for political reasons.
White attended UMES, a historically black college, with an eye toward working with computers, but after graduation she contemplated joining the military. Instead, she came across a hiring push by the Baltimore Police Department, which was looking to boost its female ranks.
She was attracted to the service aspect of law enforcement. White said she’s never had bad interactions with police and looked up to the officers who attended her neighborhood’s community meetings.
“I thought, ‘There has to be a way to give back and serve. What better place than my own community?'” she said.
White entered the police academy in 2010. For her first assignment she patrolled the Northeastern District, where she later became a neighborhood services officer.
Long-standing complaints about the Police Department led to a scathing Department of Justice investigation that earlier this year found widespread misconduct and racial disparities in enforcement. But White insists that she hasn’t witnessed those problems as a civilian or officer.
