"Do you understand what this looks like? Four white officers surrounding a Black captain outside his own house? In an election year?" He didn't wait for her answer.
"You think the papers won't eat that alive?" "I'm aware of the optics," Hollander said. "Then handle it quietly," Cole said. "Slow it down."
"Let it lose steam. The union's already nervous about morale after the last round of reforms. You push this too hard, too public, and you'll lose their support heading into November." Cole's voice stayed hard.
"That support keeps this department funded, Ellen. Don't forget that." Hollander didn't answer right away. She was staring at the wall of her office.
At the framed photo of herself shaking hands with the mayor the day she was sworn in as chief. Promising reform. Promising accountability. Promising a department the whole city could trust.
"I'll handle it," she said finally. Then she hung up before Cole could say anything else. She sat alone in her office for a long moment after that, the quiet pressing in around her. Because Cole didn't know the whole truth.
He thought this was simply about protecting the department's image. He didn't know that Hollander's exposure went deeper than that. Much deeper. Four years ago, before she was chief, before any of this, Hollander had been a supervising lieutenant reviewing citizen complaints.
She remembered the file. Petrov, Denver. Excessive force during traffic stop. She remembered reading it.
She remembered the thin evidence. She remembered making a judgment call that it wasn't worth the department's time or resources to pursue. Two years after that, a second complaint had landed on her desk. Racial bias this time.
She'd made the same call again. Quick. Clean. Filed away.
She'd told herself both times that she was protecting a good officer from an unfair system. That citizens complained about police all the time and most complaints amounted to nothing. She'd believed it. Mostly.
Or she'd wanted to. Now that same officer had four backup officers behind him, humiliating a captain on his own front lawn. An Internal Affairs review was quietly threatening to pull every thread of it back to her own signature on two old files. She picked up her desk phone and called down to Robert's office.
"I want status updates on the Rogers review before anything moves forward," Hollander said. "Every request for footage, every witness interview, it comes through me first." Robert, on the other end, hesitated. "That's not standard, Chief."
"It is now," Hollander said, and hung up. Over the following days, Robert's investigation slowed to a crawl. Requests for body-camera footage disappeared into unexplained delays. A meeting with two of the responding officers got pushed back.