Before I get to a series of facts and questions, let me tell you a story about when I was a bad kid, the kind of kid who has run-ins with the police:
This was 1994. I was attending reform school in East Tennessee. My dorm had cement floors. Metals doors. The school called itself a "college-prep boarding school," but we all knew the truth. We were locked in at night. The windows were Plexiglas with bolts on the outside. I'd already been expelled from a high school for assault before coming to this new school. Other boys in my dorm had been in gangs, shot people, been shot, dealt drugs, and had arrest records.
In our dorm, we ate handfuls of trucker speed and chugged mouthwash. We had fight nights. There was a kid who shot syringes full of steroids into his thigh before doing naked push-ups while listening to Cypress Hill at volume 10 with the door of his room wide open.
It was that kind of school.
It became criminal school on the weekends when the ex-military deans would let us roam the halls and visit each others' rooms, and do whatever it is that we did, as late as we wanted. Our deans didn't want to know anything or hear anything, and they also made it very clear that they didn't like taking us to the hospital. Their message to us was:
Don't get too messed up.
Rarely were we allowed to leave campus on weekends. It was hard to earn sign-out approval. But one weekend, my friend's aunt signed a few of us out on a Friday afternoon and vouched for us, said we'd be under her "close supervision" all weekend. We grabbed our basketball jerseys and CDs, our hoodies and cash, and for me, the small .40-caliber, stolen Derringer pistol that I kept stashed in my room.
The aunt drove us into Knoxville and dropped us at a house. Then she left. My friends and I walked down the street to a mini mart and shoulder-tapped to buy a hoard of Mickey's 22s, $1.49 a clip, as many as we could carry.
We walked back to the house afterward, arms full of cheap malt liquor, and started our party, thumping a mixture of A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, and Notorious B.I.G.
Some time after midnight, a person I didn't know came up to me and said, "The phone's for you."
I said, "What?" I was staggery. The floors appeared to have warped over the last few hours.
The kid with the phone shrugged and handed it to me.
I said, "Hello?"
"Pete?" It was my dad's voice. He'd somehow tracked down the number through the school, through the aunt. Somehow he was calling from Oregon. But the connection wasn't good. He sounded like he was standing behind me on a windy day. He said, "You have the SATs in the morning."
I didn't know what he was talking about. "I have a what?"
"The SATs. Your test. You need to be there at 8:30, and you can't be late. They don't let people into the test late."
I wrote the directions to a high school 50 miles away on the paper bag around my malt liquor. My dad and I said goodnight to each other and I hung up the phone. Then I went around the party asking people if anyone wouldn't mind driving me somewhere in a few hours.
My buddy Chris said okay, said his friends Megan and Lee were gonna go with us too, and that he needed to drop them off in another town after getting me to my SAT.
I set double alarms for 6:30, and woke everyone up, scrounged some white bread and orange juice from the kitchen, then got us all in the car. Chris still looked drunk, but he drove us to a McDonalds' where we bought some more food for the road.
There was early morning Knoxville traffic. It wasn't bad traffic because it was Saturday, but Chris was cranky and he wanted to drive at least 70 miles an hour every time he drove. He cussed and swerved us in and out of lanes, cut off other drivers, laid on his horn, and got stuck back in the middle lane. A Chevy Suburban full of what looked like University of Tennessee frat boys pulled up next to us. They jeered, yelled at Chris over his failed attempt to avoid traffic, and one of the frat boys in the backseat rolled down his window and held up a Red Rider BB gun, pointing that little air rifle at the ceiling of his car.
I rolled down my window, leaned out, and pointed my loaded pistol at his face.
Everyone in the Suburban screamed, the driver drove his vehicle straight towards the ditch next to the freeway, and Chris took the space that driver provided to also swerve, gunning a getaway that involved the freeway shoulder and an off-ramp.
A few minutes later, as we wended our way onto a rural highway, Lee rolled down his back left window and threw our McDonald's trash out onto the road. Not long after that, a sheriff's cruiser pulled in behind our car and Chris muttered cuss words as he pulled our car over to the side of the road.
The deputy took his time.
All of us were silent for a while. Then Chris said, "What do you think the penalty is for putting a pistol in someone's face?"
Megan and Lee guessed different numbers of days in jail. 30? 60?
Chris said, "Or maybe it's like an attempted robbery. A year or two?"
I said, "I don't know," and fought back the urge to roll down my window and throw the pistol out into the field next to the road.
The deputy still hadn't come up to our car.
Chris said, "I think I'd pass a breathalyzer...maybe..."
Finally, the deputy walked up toward our car. Gun drawn. Crouching. He yelled, "Hands against the windows! Hands against the windows!"
We put our hands to the glass, all four of us on different windows.
The deputy stayed behind the back left-corner of the car. Crouched low. Yelled, "Rear left passenger, get out of the car slow! Real slow!"
The four of us kept our hands on the windows but all looked at each other.
"Rear left," the deputy said, "get out of the f***ing car NOW!"
He meant Lee. Not Chris - not the driver. He was talking to Lee.
"And hands up," the deputy said, "Hands up when you come out. Stay slow. Keep your hands up real high."
I whispered, "Why is he..." then I realized what was going on. I remembered that Lee was black. Until that moment, I had forgotten about that. Lee was the only black person in our vehicle. He was six-foot-five at sixteen years old. Hair in cornrows. He was tall and black and hard to miss.
When the sheriff's deputy looked into our car, he didn't see four people. He didn't see a driver who'd been drinking all night. Didn't see me, a kid from a reform school who might be armed. He didn't see a girl. All he saw was a tall, young, strong black male. That's the sum total of what he saw in our car.
Lee got out slowly and held his hands very high.
The rest of us waited inside the car, hands still on the windows.
Half a foot taller than the deputy, Lee tried to hunch down as he held his hands up. I could see him wishing that he were shorter, see him attempting to be shorter than the deputy. Lee bent over and put his hands on the trunk. Stayed still. Listened to the deputy talk to him. Question him. Go through some kind of conversation. All while the deputy pointed his gun at Lee's back.
I kept thinking that Chris was driving after drinking, and that he'd just been speeding and driving erratically a few minutes before we got pulled over. I had a gun on me, shoved down my pants, and I'd just leaned out of a car window and pointed that gun at another car. Chris had told me earlier that Megan had drugs on her but that didn't matter. Lee was the one being frisked. Lee was the one with the gun pointed at his back.
We didn't get pulled over for littering and we didn't get pulled over because of the frat boys and the pistol, or because of Chris' driving. We got pulled over because one of us was a tall black male. That was all. And because Lee didn't have anything on him, and maybe because he was with us - three white people - the deputy let him go. Let us all go. Didn't give us a ticket or even an excuse for pulling us over. The deputy just walked back to his car and drove off. So then we knew that our traffic stop was over.
Chris drove me to my SAT, dropped me off, and I took my test. I didn't do well. Not at all. I kept thinking about things, and I had trouble focusing. Then, during a math section, because I was so tired from partying all night, I fell asleep.
That was a long, pointless, personal story, or maybe it wasn't...
In 1994, I was a messed-up kid. I eventually got caught with my stolen pistol, expelled from school, and sent to live with my grandparents in California. I would go on to be arrested and expelled from a third high school my senior year. I sported cornrows, wore hoodies, and lifted weights. Lots of people called me a "thug."
But it didn't matter. I had an advantage. When I was expelled from schools, I had an advantage.
When I was arrested, I had an advantage.
When I was questioned by police, I had an advantage.
When I was remanded to custody by an Oregon DA at seventeen, I had an advantage.
When I was picked up by a police officer in rural Texas...
When I was kicked awake by a police officer in Dallas...
Over the next few years, I realized that no police officer would ever see me and think:
HE IS DANGEROUS.
HE IS A YOUNG BLACK MALE.
That was something I came to understand in a variety of situations.
I am 7/8ths Northern European and 1/8th Mexican and people have always seen me as white, and police officers have always seen me as white, and I have always been called white, and I have thought of myself as white, and that is an enormous advantage in many situations, but particularly with police officers when they're either angry or scared, which seems to be most of the time.
Because police officers think, for whatever reason:
WHITE IS SAFE.
WHITE IS BETTER.
WHITE IS LESS LIKELY TO KILL ME.
And that's something that's nagged at me, something I've felt guilty about. Because I knew it was true even when I was sixteen years old. And I've known it was true so many times since.
It would be easy to say that this was just a story about the South. About East Tennessee. But I've also lived in New York. Arizona. Washington. Oregon. California. And the truth follows me everywhere I go. The same patterns. The same realities.
It would also be easy to say that this was a story about how it was twenty years ago. Because this story took place two decades ago. But - sadly - nothing has changed in the past twenty years. Nothing at all. Read the news in Missouri. Or Minnesota. Or Louisiana. Or anywhere.
I've been thinking about a few things lately, I've done some research, and this is what's on my mind:
- First, we all know the big names and cases, so I like to look at a few less-famous facts and stories.
- For example: In 2013, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, there were 461 "justifiable homicides" by police officers in the Unites States. When I see a number that represents 461 dead people - dead human beings - I wonder what all of those "justifiable homicides" looked like? I want to see full videos, videos that start before the incident and go until the end. Comprehensive videos. Let's see what "justifiable homicide" looks like in the United States.
- According to the BBC, 41 United States police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter between 2005 and 2011.
- But being charged doesn't mean being convicted.
- For example, according to the Baltimore Sun: In 2008, Baltimore officer Tommy Sanders was charged with manslaughter in the death of unarmed Edward Lamont Hunt. Sanders said that Hunt assaulted him then was in the process of fleeing the scene of the assault when he (Sanders) had to shoot him. Eight witnesses said the opposite, that - in fact - the police officer (Sanders) assaulted Hunt, then shot him in the back as he fled after being assaulted. But even with eight witnesses corroborating the victim's innocence, assault, and unnecessary death, Sanders was found "not guilty" in a court of law. Not guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
- Sadly, when I think about Sanders and Hunt, I'm not surprised by the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson. Policemen are the law. How can they be in trouble with the law?
- According to a 2014 Washington Post article, police departments hide their actions all the time.
- Also, it's not just police killing unarmed black men. What about police brutality?
- In 2015, former professional tennis player James Blake revealed a huge, hidden problem (apparently being black means that normal procedural rules aren't followed even in daylight on public sidewalks - and excessive force is often used). The police officer in the Blake case was disciplined because Blake is a famous millionaire. But do you think the public would've even heard about that incident if Blake weren't a famous athlete? The video of Blake standing there doing nothing - leaning against a wall - before he's attacked by a police officer is pretty crazy.
- Or what about the Atlanta Hawks' Thabo Sefolosha? According to the New York Times, New York police officers allegedly broke the NBA guard's leg and ended his season, and the TMZ videos of the incident are awful. According to the video, Sefolosha was either arrested for trying to give money to a homeless man, or for saying "relax" in a soft voice, or for staying extremely calm. All three of those actions are definitely arrestable offenses. I mean, Sefolosha is pretty tall and black...and that was way, way back in the year 2015...
- Also, where are the apologies for misconduct of all kinds? Regular citizens apologize, our parents teach us to apologize, but police officers don't even say a simple "I'm sorry" when they make mistakes, injure, or kill citizens. A few years ago, I had a gun drawn on me by an Oregon police officer because I was wearing a flat-billed hat at an angle. Did the officer apologize after holding me for an hour - when he realized that he couldn't charge me with a single crime? No. Of course not. Instead of apologizing, he said, "I've decide not to arrest you at this time." He let me go, after I'd committed no crime.
- Police officers have too much power and questionable background-check systems. The worst bully I knew growing up became a Virginia police officer as an adult. This was a high school kid who would duct-tape, handcuff, and beat-up middle school kids that he out-weighed by 100 pounds. Then, by this bully's mid-twenties, he was wearing a badge and carrying a gun, with the power to arrest people. If anyone this guy ever knew in his entire lifetime was asked about his character, he wouldn't have been allowed to become a police officer. But apparently those kinds of questions are never asked when vetting police candidates.
- Also, when it comes to profiling and perceived race - it's easy to think that an event will happen to someone else. A few equalizing examples though are tattoos, flat-billed hats, hooded sweatshirts, time of night, angle of light, make of car...so what if it happens to you? Will we care more when it's us? Or when it's someone we know?
- Police officers mess with everyone - even bicycle riders - because policing has become an act of dominance rather than a call to "serve and protect." How can we change the system so that serving and protecting become the main goals?
- But I've met good and kind-hearted police officers, officers who care about people and look out for individuals' safety. Unfortunately - in my experience - that's about one-in-five officers. I wonder what ratio other people would give if asked to give a ratio.
- Did you see the video of a Saint Louis police officer punching the handcuffed teenager in 2012? The judge in that case ruled that the officer was NOT guilty without ever watching the video. Watch the video and see for yourself if you think the police officer's actions were justified.
- Also, did you know that a naked, unarmed college student was killed by South Alabama police in 2012? What weapon was he carrying on his NAKED body?
- Finally, nobody's at fault for Freddie Gray's death. "Procedures weren't followed" (passive voice) but nobody was at fault...
- According to The Guardian, in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.
- So, sometimes I ask myself this question: Can I defend myself against a police officer if he attacks me first? Am I allowed to react to his unprovoked anger and aggression?
- Or what if I'm legally carrying a gun? If a police officer draws his gun on me even when I'm not being dangerous or aggressive or committing a crime, am I allowed to shoot him out of self-defense? I mean, I wasn't the one who took the situation to the guns-drawn level, so am I allowed to save my own life?
- And if we can't save our own lives...