The Victim Who Became the Accused

Waters, the only Black female cop in her department, said, “Something happened, you know, and I don’t remember all of it.”Photographs by Ryan Cardoso for The New Yorker

Put-in-Bay, a village on an island off the northern coast of Ohio, is sometimes called the Key West of the Midwest. In the winter, the population is roughly three hundred, nearly all white. In the summer, hundreds of thousands of tourists arrive by ferry or private plane to drink at the island’s fifty-two bars. Men celebrating bachelor parties go around in golf carts, carrying inflatable naked women. The police chief told me that he’s known as “the guy who pulls people over and deflates the blow-up dolls.”

In July, 2020, Arica Waters, the only Black female cop on the island, was invited to a pool party. She was twenty-seven and had been hired five weeks before, as a seasonal employee without benefits. She was ebullient and quick to make friends. “Some people say, ‘Oh, Waters is a flirt,’ ” she told me, “but that’s just my personality. I’m a friendly person. I give out compliments. I like to hype people up.” Meri LeBlanc, a bouncer on the island, said that Waters was open about her sexual desires, freely expressing her attraction to women and men. “She wasn’t plain,” she said. “She wasn’t the square cut of what they thought a police officer should be.”

The party was hosted by Jeremy Berman, a detective in the department, who had a house on a private road overlooking Lake Erie. Berman’s wife and young son were there, but he seemed to be paying extra attention to Waters, who wore a long yellow sundress. In a text message to a friend, Waters wrote, “The rich ass dude definitely has a thing for me lolol.”

As they were sitting by the pool, Waters told Berman, who was close with members of the village’s government, that she was hoping to get a full-time job in the department. Berman offered to put in a good word. “I think she would be fantastic for a full-time position,” he texted the mayor from the party. “She’s got the perfect disposition.” (The mayor responded, “Noted. Little interaction I’ve had with her it makes sense.”)

Berman’s house was next to the island’s airport, a small runway in a field near the water. When Waters and another guest said that they had never been in a private plane, Berman called a friend who runs an aviation business. Within fifteen minutes, a helicopter had landed near the pool. Berman handed Waters three hundred-dollar bills to give to the pilot.

“I’m in a helicopter holy crap,” Waters texted her mother from the air. She told her mom that the trip—a lap around the island—had been arranged by “the rich cop.”