‘Angel Cop’ Speaks Out After Viral LeBron Letter: ‘I Was Lebron James Before I Became A Police Officer’

Los Angeles Police Officer Deon Joseph, who wrote a viral letter to LeBron James asking to meet after the NBA star targeted a police officer on social media, spoke out Tuesday explaining the reason he decided to reach out to James and request a sit-down talk. 

Joseph, who is known by some on Skid Row as “Angel Cop,” told Fox News in an interview that everybody is hurting and separated right now, and the last thing that we need is to widen the chasm between people. So in a letter that went viral, Joseph requested a sit-down meeting with LeBron James to talk with him about the realities of police work. 

“I don’t want to call him irrational,” James told Fox. “If I wasn’t a police officer, and all I saw 24/7 on social media and on the radio was that the police are out to get black people, police hate people of color — and they’re repeating that over and over again — I’d probably feel the same way. So I was LeBron James before I became a police officer.”

Joseph said that he doesn’t want people to think of him as “calling out” James. 

“I’m about hoping that we can sit down like men and have a civil conversation, and understand and humanize each other. That’s the main reason that I reached out the way that I did,” said Joseph, who was notably surrounded by L.A. Lakers gear. “I think he’s a good human being. The things he’s done for children I think is incredible, and man, when people were giving him flack, I was like, ‘Dude, this is a good dude right here.’”

“Now of course I didn’t like what he said,” added Joseph. “But I feel like, in my heart, that there’s hope — if not he and I — maybe what I’ve done can spark dialogue across the nation where cops and communities can start sitting down again and humanize each other once again. That’s so important.”

Growing up, Joseph hated police officers. In an interview with Liberty University last year, Joseph said that before joining the force, he was “indoctrinated to hate, fear, and loathe law enforcement.” His perspective, he recalled, was influenced by what was around him, by “watching the Rodney King incident” on loop, by listening to “F*** the police” in his Nissan Sentra, and just hanging out with an anti-police activist crowd. 

“Every day was this steady indoctrination that the police were our enemies,” he said. 

But after the L.A. riots, when Joseph said he couldn’t find work anywhere else, he decided to give the police department a chance. 

“I discovered that 90% of what was told to me by friends and family was not true,” Joseph told Liberty last year. “I was able to freely express how African Americans felt to my white and Hispanic classmates, and they were open and receptive. My whole idea of police work changed after that, and I became addicted to serving, watching my fellow officers from all walks of life help people, rescue people, and save lives.”

Over his more than two decades in law enforcement, Joseph developed a reputation for his compassion for the people of Skid Row, an area with rampant homelessness. After what he termed “an officer-involved shooting” in the area, and after “agitators” began spreading rumors about the incident, Joseph told Liberty University that he visited the area to talk to people about what had happened. 

“I didn’t run away. I became like family to this community, so I’m going to go out there to my family, and I’m going to walk and I’m going to talk with them,” said Joseph. “And as I did this, I discovered that 75% of the people I talked to were like, ‘We understand what you did. That guy was crazy’…They understood.”

“And the ones that didn’t, I stood tall, ten-toes down, and I had dialogue with them, and I said, ‘Hey, if you were in this situation what would you do?’ And eventually, they all agreed, ‘You know what, yeah, we probably would have done the same thing.’ And it completely stopped that Ferguson Effect. So that’s what I do. You become like family, they’re willing to listen to you, and that’s what I encourage a lot of law enforcement officers to do. Don’t run, I know it’s hard, I know you feel like a beast at every feast, but we can’t give up in showing who we are in our heart,” said Joseph. 

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