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noisysignalThis upsetting essay has been making the rounds today, about a woman held at gunpoint by cops for "breaking in" to her own apartment.
Her story powerfully and rightly centers the intersection of white supremacy and police violence. I'm going to tell my own little story here which is only about police violence. Not to pull attention away from the very real impact of racism in these issues, but to reinforce how endemic this problem is.
A few weeks ago I was traveling with a partner of mine, in a mid-size U.S. city. We were driving to meet friends for dinner when we came to a place where the traffic stopped. An ambulance flew past us. I expected to see a minor accident up ahead.
Instead, we saw literally dozens of police officers converging on a car that had been disabled with road spikes in the middle of the road. A man was running away from the street alongside a building. A dog and one officer chased him.
The dog got ahead of the man, who swerved to avoid it. That pause let the office tackle him. As soon as the man hit the ground, the cop began punching him in the face. Another office jumped on top of the man and started hitting him also. Then a third. Pretty quickly a dozen more officers had converged on the scene and formed a ring around the people on the ground.
The man was unarmed and never tried to get up, that we saw. We filmed what we could of the arrest, and drove to dinner extremely shaken up.
I assumed throughout dinner that the man we'd seen beaten up was a suspect in a violent crime. Probably a murder. Maybe of a cop.
We immediately recorded our impressions of the event and contacted the ACLU to report the police brutality and request guidance.
It took two days to get hold of them, and when I did they said, "What do you want to do about this?"
I told them I'd been hoping they could tell me. They didn't seem surprised or alarmed by my report.
I learned from the Internet that the man who was arrested was not a suspect in a violent crime. He was driving a stolen car and failed to pull over when a cop signaled him to do so. The police claimed that they found drugs in the vehicle after his arrest. There was almost no media coverage of his arrest, and no mention of any possible police misconduct.
I called the police misconduct hotline for the city we were visiting. A sergeant told me that they don't take third party complaints. If the man they'd already beaten up and were holding in jail wanted to complain, he said, I could corroborate his story, but I couldn't file my own complaint.
I wound up contacting the public defender and giving him my contact information. I told him my partner and I were both willing to testify about the police violence we'd witnessed if his client wanted to press a complaint. I haven't heard from him.
I work with a lot of victims of violent crime. I know they have many, many reasons for not pursuing legal action against their attackers, especially when there's a huge difference of power and public credibility, as there would be in this case. I try to sleep at night knowing I gave the victim of this crime the resources to use my credibility in his favor if he wants to.
The stickiest thing about this, and the reason I'm writing about it now, is that no one but me & my sweetie was surprised. The ACLU, the police sergeant, the public defender. They all seemed to know that this is business as usual for cops.
I've been actively supporting the Black Lives Matter movement since Mike Brown's death, since before it had a name and any kind of structure. I've been watching with horror as police killings of unarmed people continue at a record pace. AND I WAS STILL SURPRISED.
What I learned from this is that the murders we see in the news, the occasional moving stories from survivors of police misconduct, are absolutely not outliers. The police state in this country isn't a temporarily dysfunctional system that shelters racists, predators and bad apples.
It is the problem. It turns good people, people who want to help others, into thugs and killers. It constantly creates and reinforces narratives of fear and control.
And this violence is segregated enough by race and class that me and my peers get to believe it is unusual. I read an article recently about Black teens experiences of school and racism. It made the point that teens who attend more diverse schools are more aware of racism because they see themselves being treated differently from their white peers. Black teens in all Black neighborhoods tend to assume that everyone is routinely harassed by cops, so they don't call attention to it as unusual.
I, obviously, do not have answers to this problem. I'm just telling this story to be one more tiny voice calling attention to the problem.
Her story powerfully and rightly centers the intersection of white supremacy and police violence. I'm going to tell my own little story here which is only about police violence. Not to pull attention away from the very real impact of racism in these issues, but to reinforce how endemic this problem is.
A few weeks ago I was traveling with a partner of mine, in a mid-size U.S. city. We were driving to meet friends for dinner when we came to a place where the traffic stopped. An ambulance flew past us. I expected to see a minor accident up ahead.
Instead, we saw literally dozens of police officers converging on a car that had been disabled with road spikes in the middle of the road. A man was running away from the street alongside a building. A dog and one officer chased him.
The dog got ahead of the man, who swerved to avoid it. That pause let the office tackle him. As soon as the man hit the ground, the cop began punching him in the face. Another office jumped on top of the man and started hitting him also. Then a third. Pretty quickly a dozen more officers had converged on the scene and formed a ring around the people on the ground.
The man was unarmed and never tried to get up, that we saw. We filmed what we could of the arrest, and drove to dinner extremely shaken up.
I assumed throughout dinner that the man we'd seen beaten up was a suspect in a violent crime. Probably a murder. Maybe of a cop.
We immediately recorded our impressions of the event and contacted the ACLU to report the police brutality and request guidance.
It took two days to get hold of them, and when I did they said, "What do you want to do about this?"
I told them I'd been hoping they could tell me. They didn't seem surprised or alarmed by my report.
I learned from the Internet that the man who was arrested was not a suspect in a violent crime. He was driving a stolen car and failed to pull over when a cop signaled him to do so. The police claimed that they found drugs in the vehicle after his arrest. There was almost no media coverage of his arrest, and no mention of any possible police misconduct.
I called the police misconduct hotline for the city we were visiting. A sergeant told me that they don't take third party complaints. If the man they'd already beaten up and were holding in jail wanted to complain, he said, I could corroborate his story, but I couldn't file my own complaint.
I wound up contacting the public defender and giving him my contact information. I told him my partner and I were both willing to testify about the police violence we'd witnessed if his client wanted to press a complaint. I haven't heard from him.
I work with a lot of victims of violent crime. I know they have many, many reasons for not pursuing legal action against their attackers, especially when there's a huge difference of power and public credibility, as there would be in this case. I try to sleep at night knowing I gave the victim of this crime the resources to use my credibility in his favor if he wants to.
The stickiest thing about this, and the reason I'm writing about it now, is that no one but me & my sweetie was surprised. The ACLU, the police sergeant, the public defender. They all seemed to know that this is business as usual for cops.
I've been actively supporting the Black Lives Matter movement since Mike Brown's death, since before it had a name and any kind of structure. I've been watching with horror as police killings of unarmed people continue at a record pace. AND I WAS STILL SURPRISED.
What I learned from this is that the murders we see in the news, the occasional moving stories from survivors of police misconduct, are absolutely not outliers. The police state in this country isn't a temporarily dysfunctional system that shelters racists, predators and bad apples.
It is the problem. It turns good people, people who want to help others, into thugs and killers. It constantly creates and reinforces narratives of fear and control.
And this violence is segregated enough by race and class that me and my peers get to believe it is unusual. I read an article recently about Black teens experiences of school and racism. It made the point that teens who attend more diverse schools are more aware of racism because they see themselves being treated differently from their white peers. Black teens in all Black neighborhoods tend to assume that everyone is routinely harassed by cops, so they don't call attention to it as unusual.
I, obviously, do not have answers to this problem. I'm just telling this story to be one more tiny voice calling attention to the problem.
