Two summers ago, I was working with a landscaping company in Jackson, New Jersey, a few miles from the shore. Being in the sun for ten hours a day had turned my skin probably about as brown as it can get. As one may or may not assume, most of my coworkers were from central America, mostly Mexico. They were a great group of guys who loved to joke around and only knew three words of English: fuck, shit, and pussy. On a pretty typical day of work (ninety degrees in the shade), a few of us were driving from one spot to another the way we usually did, which was sitting in the back of a pickup with our equipment. This is, of course, illegal in the state of New Jersey, and we got pulled over. The officer opened up the tailgate and said, "Let's go, fellas. I need to see some papers." While my coworkers went to the cab of the truck and got their working papers, I stayed in the bed and said to the officer, "I'm actually a citizen, sir." He closed his eyes, nodded, motioned for me to get out, and said, "Yeah, ok bud. Let's go." He didn't believe me. I said to him in my completely accent-free voice, "Sir, I'm not sure what you're getting at, but I don't have working papers. I'm a citizen and I was born here." It wasn't until I produced my driver's license that the officer realized that I was telling the truth. He was clearly embarrassed, and some of my coworkers were already giggling at him. As he gathered all of our documents, we could tell the officer was still suspicious of me. He looked at me and said, "You ok, pal? You got a far-off look in your eye. You're not gonna run on me, are you?" Completely taken aback, I said, "again, I'm not sure what you're getting at, but I have absolutely no reason to run." He probably thought I had a warrant. He wasn't trying to help me out by letting me admit to something before he found out, he was baiting me into saying something incriminating. He was flustered and probably a little surprised when he found out I had a clean record. When her returned from his squad car, he of course tried to make nice and said I "looked much better now." I didn't buy it and I let him know as much. From that day on, my coworkers called me "mike the mexican gringo."
In light of recent events, not a terribly dramatic story. But it was my first up-close and personal encounter with what is commonly referred to as a "bad cop." This and stories like it are just tiny windows into the precarious intersection of race and justice in America. Historically, law enforcement and minority groups don't have a very strong track record of working well together, especially not for long periods of time. Add to that several crippling cycles of poverty and crime in American communities that are most often in contact with law enforcement. Mix in some very, very bad cops doing very, very bad things and the technology to record it all in high definition, and you have yourself the makings of a nice little shitstorm. Plenty of other things are at play, but those are the ones that I see as the long-term issues that have been swept under the rug for about a hundred years too long. It may sound dramatic, but I think what we are experiencing is one of those times in our national history when we will be able to either look back and say, "it may not have been perfect, but the right things were addressed and acted upon," or "I wish we had done something about that earlier, because now its ten times worse."
I don't know that I totally agree with the "police forces should look like the communities they police" idea. If we're going to make racial bias a non-factor in policing, it shouldn't play a roll in deciding who gets to be a police officer. What matters more is that police understand the communities they protect, because I think it's clear that too many of them don't. As someone who has grown up in the woods, I can't speak very authoritatively about inner-city culture. However, I am familiar with the hypermasculinity and the need to exert control over people in a very basic way that are facts of life in most American cities. In "urban" areas, gangs and groups like gangs occupy most of the time and resources of police forces, so police are best trained to deal with those sorts of people. Tactics for dealing with gangs and tactics for dealing with someone selling cigarettes illegally are obviously different. But when you've been primarily trained to deal with what I will call domestic terrorists, lines blur. It's in the situations where that kind of force is not needed that the cops lacking in self-control tend to outshine those who are not. Policemen are human beings, and in stressful situations, reasoning skills give way to primal fears and deeply entrenched biases. Split second decisions are made, bang bang, an innocent person dies.
Poverty is of course a part of all of this. We all know the statistical economic disparities between white Americans and minority groups, and the link between poverty and crime is a real one. As people slip further into poverty, they are more likely to commit crimes (please note: for those of us who know where our next meal is coming from, it's very easy to say "just obey laws and police won't bother you"). The various factors making American prisons extremely profitable makes judges just a smidge more likely to dish out unreasonable sentences. This takes fathers and sons out of communities that need them and puts them into a system that makes them violent. They return from prison angry, hardened, and more likely to commit crimes. They commit another crime, they go back to jail. What's more, the young people in these communities look up to these criminals because they don't back down to cops, which fosters a culture of disobedience that terrifies "law and order" politicians. That's how the "American System" has, perhaps without anyone really realizing it, made crime in inner cities profitable. It has incentivized cyclical incarceration, and that is something that needs to be reformed YESTERDAY if we're even going to pretend that preventing crime is more important than making money.
It goes without saying that bad cops constitute a fraction of all cops. I hope we all understand that that fact doesn't dispense us from the need to root out bad cops, or distracts us from the fact that just one bad cop can do a boatload of damage. But I digress. One of the most important things we can take away from the last several weeks is that bad cops have been slow to realize that almost everyone under their jurisdiction owns a phone that can take video. It's not impossible, but it's pretty darn difficult to take a video out of context. It's right there in front of you. A person on the ground without a gun being shot by a person with a gun. I have a hard time believing that there is a police force in the world which, if it were asked publicly, would tell you that killing an unarmed and/or subdued person is the correct course of action in virtually any situation. Of course the American judicial system moves about as slow as it possibly can without stopping on these matters, so the question of whether or not videos like the ones seen in Baton Rouge will be admissible court is probably in question. Which is of course complete fucking nonsense, but laws are laws, even the stupid ones. However, these types of occurrences have to make even the most ardent "blue lives matter" folks wonder: exactly can police officers NOT do without even being indicted? If the answer isn't shooting a defenseless man in the head point-blank, I can honestly say I don't know what is.
I don't think anyone can say within reason that racism is not a part of America, and to say that racial bias plays no part in the American justice system is nonsense, to put it politely. It is an unfortunate part of our culture, and I would say that ignoring it is large part of our culture as well. We all want to think that since the important pieces of paper say that discrimination is illegal, it doesn't happen, and it certainly can't be systemic in scale. Whether we want it to be or not, it is an indelible part of our national conscience. It is the stain that will never, ever wash away. What is white privilege, you ask? It's the privilege of knowing that entire generations of your family were never owned by other Americans. If your country had to fight a war in order to change that, I suspect you'd have some mixed feelings about the desire to make things like the good ol' days. I can only speak for what I have seen. My sisters and I grew up in an relatively diverse place, and having preconceived notions about people based on their race was simply not part of our upbringing. I don't think any of us really quite understand it, even to this day. What I have seen, however, is that it is still an integral part of many of my peers' childhoods. It's worth noting that that day a few summers ago wasn't the first time I had been called Mexican: in high school, some of my cheekier classmates called me "The Mexican," which was of course the pinnacle of humor in a lilly-white catholic school.
I suppose the best-case scenario that I see from this crap going forward is that we make it our solemn duty to make sure prejudice and contrived biases are not a part of our childrens' world. I hope they see these events one day and they know that they are the worst that we have to offer as a species. I hope that they see these events and say, "Why would someone do that? It doesn't make any sense." Or better yet, "I've never seen something like that." For me, it has a become a question of national maturity. It's easy enough to say "black/blue/all lives matter," but it requires uncommon determination and (gasp) trust in one another to make those words something other than a post-tragedy battle cry. In a place where individuality and personal accountability are preached, we can't push aside our responsibility to make our childrens' lives more just. Because I promise you they are the ones who will suffer the consequences of our foot-dragging. They will be the ones who will have to clean up our mess when we were well within our means to clean it up ourselves. And if that doesn't motivate us to be better every single day and not just for a few days after a national outrage, I don't think anything will.
