Patrick Waldo is a friend of my friend and music colleague, Steff Reed. He wrote the following detailed experience regarding police interaction and White privilege. As a disclaimer to the disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed are that of the original author, and do not necessary represent that of the owner of this blog (wink).
Disclaimer: This post is not for cookies or likes. This is for generating ideas about ways to use privilege.
Thursday, February 25, 2016: Today I was walking through Hell's Kitchen at about 11:30am and saw this cop pull up next to a young Black high schooler. He looked no older than 15 or 16. She rolled her window down and told him to come to the car. Without getting out of her seat, she started questioning him. "Where are you going? Where do you go to school? Why aren't you there right now? Where are you from? How do I know you go to that school?"
The boy was patient and calm and extremely polite, given the fact that he was literally walking along a public sidewalk minding his own business and was now being interrogated by a police officer. At one point I heard him ask nicely, "Why are you asking all of this?" The officer said "I'm just doing my job." At that moment I approached the car. She stopped questioning him, turned her attention to me, and asked me what I was doing. I replied "I'm just doing my job." She looked annoyed and asked "And what is that?" I said "To make sure innocent people don't get harassed by police." I told her I was going to pull my phone out and film her, which I did. I kept a safe distance so as not to "interfere" with her brave police work, and I filmed the rest of their interaction. When she was done talking to him, he walked off and I kept an eye on the police to make sure they left him alone. They didn't. They crept closely beside him as he walked in the direction of his school. I caught up to him and asked him if he was okay. He was noticeably scared and nervous. I asked him what she said to him in the last moments and he said they were going to follow him to his school to make sure that was where he was going.
I gave him a Black Lives Matter wristband because in that moment I felt like the police officers and everyone else passing by and doing nothing while an innocent kid was being harassed by police conveyed the opposite message, that his life didn't matter. I told him his rights in case this happened again. That he has the right to remain silent, but that what he did, speaking calmly and politely to the officer while answering her questions truthfully was the perfect way to handle the situation. I suggested next time he use coded language to convey to the police that he knows his rights and won't be easily violated. "I'm sorry officer, am I being detained?" If the answer is no, calmly walk away. Get on a train or go to a bodega but leave the situation. If the answer is yes, the officer has to have reasonable suspicion to detain him, so ask "What reasonable suspicion do you have that I am committing a crime?"
By the end of our conversation, he was approaching his school. I told him I was going to wait outside to make sure they left him alone. He shook my hand and thanked me and went inside. The police officer got out of her car and walked inside behind him. It seemed like she stayed in for an eternity. Her partner waited outside with the car running. When I asked her partner to roll the window down so I could let her know about the environmental effects and health hazards of idling engines, she refused at first. When she finally rolled it down and I told her kids are more susceptible to the effects of idling engine pollution and asked that she turn her engine off since she is sitting right in front of a school, she rolled her eyes, rolled her window back up and went back to playing on her phone. New York's finest.
Eventually the first officer emerged from the school. I was worried the boy would be with her in handcuffs, arrested for truancy or something equally absurd. For those of you who think that's a stretch, Google "school to prison pipeline." It's a very real and shockingly awful thing. I was relieved to see her walking out alone. I don't know what further harassment he might have endured inside the school, but I could at least relax knowing he wasn't going to a police station for being a teenager. Or not today at least.
I asked her if she knew how police in this country got their start? If she knew that the first police were slave catching patrols, roaming around looking for runaway slaves that they could lock up and return to their owners. Their purpose was to control, punish, and surveil Black people, and to make it crystal clear that any rebellion or pushback or attempt to gain freedom was out of the question. I asked, "You realize the similarity right? Of using your power to harass and intimidate a young black man who is walking through a neighborhood committing no crime at all? You understand why that would give someone pause, right?" She ignored me, got in her car, and drove off. The interaction was over at least.
It was an uncomfortable experience, not preferable at all. I would have been happier ignoring the encounter as I walked by it, telling myself the boy was probably going to be fine and nothing bad would happen and I could go on my way. But the discomfort and inconvenience I felt from going a few blocks out of my way and having my schedule interrupted for 15-20 minutes doesn't compare to the discomfort and inconvenience so many People of Color live with every day, as they are forced to explain to authorities why they are walking through their own neighborhoods or walking to and from their own schools.
So my challenge is this, white friends, get involved. Be the change you want to see in the world. Get uncomfortable, inconvenience yourself, and FILM THE POLICE. Film the police. Film the police. You have every legal right to film the police in New York and many other states, as long as you aren't interfering with police activity. So don't interfere, don't escalate the situation, but stand nearby and film the interaction. Let your presence be known. Show the person being questioned that you care about their rights, and show the police officers that you are watching them and won't let them get away with any misconduct. Some officers act professional and ignore you. Other officers get angry that you are filming them and turn their attention to you. Good. You have now successfully diverted attention away from the person being questioned. If the officer asks you why you're filming them, you have every legal right to remain silent. Or you can be polite and say "Just to make sure everything goes smoothly, officer. For your safety and everyone else's." Or you can be brutally honest and say what I say. "Because I don't trust you. Too many cases of police misconduct and police brutality have gone unchecked for too long, and I don't trust that you will report this interaction honestly if something does go wrong." You might be surprised how often pulling a cellphone out and filming ends a police interaction. They would much rather move on to someone who doesn't have a camera over their shoulder filming the entire interaction.
This is our privilege. Use it. A Black man might do the same thing but be stopped a block away because he "fits the description" of a suspect they are searching for. If he has a warrant for this arrest because of one unpaid parking ticket, he is now under arrest and headed to jail. That usually isn't our reality. Whether it's because they think we are more litigious, or more powerful, or better connected, or whatever, police officers treat us differently. It is a fact of life. They behave better around us because they don't think they can get away with as much. That's why broken windows policing targets communities of color almost exclusively. If they policed white neighborhoods the way they police Black neighborhoods, we would have used our privilege to overhaul the NYPD a long time ago. But they don't, and so we ignore it, and they get away with it. So let's commit to not ignoring the glaring disparities in policing, and use our privilege for something other than smoking weed in public, or hailing a cab, or getting out of a police interaction. Let's use our privilege for something other than ourselves. Film the police. Because we can and we should.
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