By RationalThoughtProcess
I’m a middle-aged white guy. I
was born lucky (i.e., white male American, with loving, affluent, involved
parents) and just kept getting luckier, so I have had very little interaction
with the police in my life.
But let me tell you a little
story. It will seem incredibly trivial — perhaps even offensively so — compared
to the brutality and murder meted out by cops against black folks (and other
folks too), but there is a point to it.
Last year, I was pulled over by
a police officer.
I was driving my grandmother to
a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t know where I was going, and she only
intermittently knows where she is :-), so she was giving me directions,
turn-by-turn. We came to a 4-way stop. Since I didn’t know whether I was
supposed to go straight or turn left or turn right, I came to a complete dead
stop and waited for my grandmother to tell me which way to go. As I looked up
the road to my left, I noticed a police cruiser parked on the shoulder. Gramma
eventually said to take a right, so I did. Moments later I saw flashing lights
in my mirror.
I had no idea why I might be
getting pulled and I was extremely surprised when the officer told me it was
for not stopping at the stop sign.
I said, “I absolutely did
stop.”
He said, “Sir, you didn’t even
slow down.”
Simply put, that was a
bald-faced lie. (And also utterly ridiculous — the cop
was claiming that I approached an intersection, going 20 or 30 miles per hour,
and executed a 90-degree turnwithout braking, in an SUV.)
I exclaimed, "What?!"
and emitted a few demure sounds of disbelief, while my grandmother piped up and
said, “That’s not true at all.” The officer made it clear he wasn't in the mood
for a debate, so I shut up and gave him my license and paperwork, and he
returned to his cruiser.
Turns out we were within sight
of Gramma’s doctor’s building, so after a minute or two she started to get out
of the car, saying she’d just walk. However, the minor bit of arguing I’d done
was apparently enough to spur the cop to call for backup (!) because there were
now threesquad
cars present (in case this highly dangerous situation went south, I guess), so
I jokingly told her, “I don’t want you to do that Gramma, they might
taser you.” Gramma’s too old to give a crap, so she got out
and walked, and nothing happened, but I’m willing to bet the cops wouldn’t have
been so easy going if it hadn’t been an elderly white lady hobbling away.
Anyway, to wrap the story up, I
got a ticket and it cost me $265 (including the cost of an online remedial
driver’s course to avoid getting points), and that’s the end of it.
But here’s the thing: that wasn’t the end
of it, not really, because that cop flat out lied,
and I will never, ever forget it. It has permanently damaged
my trust in the police.
I mean, I already knew that
cops often falsify police reports, especially to cover up their own brutality
and protect their peers, but that was abstract and those cases are severe and,
in a perverse way, understandable, insofar as cops who have done something
really wrong have a motive to take extraordinary measures to cover it up.
In a weird way, the fact that
this cop’s lying was so trivial, so unnecessary,
so unmotivated by anything other than a desire to write a ticket (it was the
30th of the month, maybe it’s true
they have to fill a quota) —
somehow that’s even more damaging to
my trust than knowing that cops lie about super-serious matters.
As a result of this incident, I
am now inclined to disbelieve any police statement on any matter whatsoever, no
matter how trivial or serious. I can’t imagine anything that would ever make me
trust a police officer again. Not fully anyway. There will always be doubt and
wariness. And there will always be a kernel of anger and resentment.
I’m sure there are millions of
people who, if they were to read this diary, would laugh ruefully and say,
“Welcome to our world,” or “Welcome to the real world.” I get that. But there
are millions more who are just like me — they've never personally experienced
stark dishonesty by the police, and they don’t
appreciate how it feels.
I am trying to imagine what it
must be like to live in Ferguson, where the police issue an unfathomable number
of citations — far more than are issued in other cities, far more than could
possibly be justifiable — and a large percentage of them are obviously bullshit,
either because the infractions are so trivial that police in a normal city
would let them slide, or because there aren’t any actual crimes, it’s just
Ferguson cops making shit up, or both. How can there be anytrust
between police and citizens in that town? Then layer on top of it the
empirically documented racial discrimination. Then layer brutality on top of
that. If I lived in Ferguson, and I was black, I would be seething,
all the time. God bless the people of Ferguson for having the decency to bear
all that, year after year, and god damn the people who practice and promote
systemic injustice (including me).
Aren’t there lots of police
officers who are decent human beings? Surely. Aren’t there plenty of dedicated
detectives going above and beyond to bring justice to victims? There must be; I
see them every week on 48 Hours and Dateline. I’m not so jaded that I’m not
going to call 911 if the need arises. And chances are, if that happens, I will
end up being grateful for the police.
But my immediate reaction
when I hear the police account of an alleged crime is skepticism. I
instinctively doubt that the police account is true. For
me, that’s new. For others, it’s been that way for a long time. For still
others, it’s not that way yet, but
it will be, sooner or later.
What kind of society will we
have when nobody trusts
the police? Because that’s where
we’re headed
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