Family
Fancy was married to a woman named Lillian (played by Tamara Tunie) with two daughters and a son. He loved his wife dearly but was overprotective of her when learning of her last pregnancy (his son, Art Jr.) because of her diabetes, and it took some time for him to apologize to her. He had a younger brother, a hotheaded uniformed officer named Reggie (played by Michael Jai White) who was distrustful of whites. Reggie's combatitive behavior drew the ire of his sergeant, a bigoted officer named McNamara who came through the academy with Arthur. McNamara would claim that Reggie was in the wrong line of work with his attitudes towards white bosses, and would later help a black gypsy cab driver file a harassment claim against Reggie in the hopes of having Reggie's badge. McNamara blamed the harassment claim on the NYPD's programs that were developed to assist minority citizens, claiming that it was department procedure to take any harassment complaint from a minority citizen seriously, even if it was a minority officer such as Reggie who was being accused of the harassment. Arthur however saw both McNamara's racism and his helping of the cabbie to write the complaint (Arthur noted the "textbook language" on the complaint) and had the 15th's detectives investigate the cabbie to squash the harassment claim. After resolving the cabbie situation, Arthur recognizing that Reggie's troubles with McNamara wouldn't go away and told Reggie to immediately get a transfer away from McNamara—but not before pointing out that none of the detectives who reached out for him (Medavoy, Martinez, and Simone) to squash the complaint were African-American, thus finally teaching Reggie a serious lesson in trust. It was revealed in Season 6 that Fancy's father was an alcoholic who stole his mother's hard-earned money and died a broken man in the streets. Fancy took in a foster child named Maceo in Season 1, and was devastated when Maceo's mom, a reformed drug abuser, returned to claim custody of her son. The story took a sad turn in Season 4 when Maceo was arrested for running drugs for his off-the-wagon mom, and Fancy had to convince him to cooperate with the NYPD in a sting against her dealer cohorts. Later, the mom blamed Maceo and said prison might do him some good—as Maceo watched from an observation window. Fancy put together a plea deal with the D.A.'s office, where Maceo would spend a few years in a work farm instead of many years in jail and consoled his former foster son about how he could still make something of his life.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Fancy
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“It seems to me that upbringings have themes. The parents set the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately.... The theme may be “Our family has a distinguished heritage that you must live up to” or “No matter what happens, we are fortunate to be together in this lovely corner of the earth” or “We have worked hard so that you can have the opportunities we didn’t have.””
—Calvin Trillin (20th century)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“What we often take to be family values—the work ethic, honesty, clean living, marital fidelity, and individual responsibility—are in fact social, religious, or cultural values. To be sure, these values are transmitted by parents to their children and are familial in that sense. They do not, however, originate within the family. It is the value of close relationships with other family members, and the importance of these bonds relative to other needs.”
—David Elkind (20th century)