Fearing "Protect and Serve"

-- By TaleahTyrell - 16 Apr 2021

Pretextual Stops Escalating

Pretextual Stops are not Uncommon

A year ago, while driving around an affluent San Diego neighborhood with my boyfriend the cops stopped us.

"May I ask what we did wrong officer?" "Your license plate is not from California."

We looked at each other, scared as the cop walked back to his car to run the license. A few minutes later he came back to the car, this time, completely ignoring him, only talking to me.

"Where is he from?" the cop asked me. And then, "Ma'm, I need to see your license or identification too."

Luckily I'd brought my wallet along. I gave him my identification and he said, "Oh, you are from here." He let us go.

Our day was ruined. We left angry, confused, hurt, but most of all embarrassed. Why did he ask for MY license if I was not the one driving? Why did he stop us for driving around with a Tennessee license plate? I started crying, fuming. Was this just a “bad apple” or was there a bigger problem? I don't know what I would've done had I been asked to get out of the car that day. I want to say that I would comply and do all as I was asked to do. But even knowing all the rules, I can't be 100% sure how my sympathetic nervous system would've reacted. I can't say that my fight or flight instincts wouldn't hit me and I too would be, like Daunte, trying to flee the situation in fear.

Re-imagining Policing for those who FEAR Police

Both Parties Fearing Other

The death of George Floyd last year shook many Americans to their core. As the officer who shot him stands in trial, we see how different this case has been for others. The wall of defense that police officers normally have for each other has largely broken down. We have witnessed officer after officer testify against one of their own, to the disbelief of many. Cities have also made changes. Efforts to "defund the police" have spurred throughout the country. But what does it mean to "defund" a cornerstone of our society? Some say its allocating some of their resources to other services such as mental health counselors, community vigilante groups, and social workers, arguing that they should be alternative numbers of citizens to call for help during a situation. Others argue that the money should go towards racial bias training so that officers can identify and overcome this instinct. A smaller group calls for officers to get more training so that they learn to de-escalate situations without resorting to killing.

Many black people in this country, however, who know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of pretextual stops and micro-aggression also know that the answer cannot include police officers in the form that they are currently presented. There is a deep un-spoken, but deeply embedded rule within the black community I was raised in: Don't call the po po. Issues are largely solved within the community. We largely defer to pastors or respected elders when it comes to solving issue within the community. As for interactions with the police that are not by our choice, we largely try to avoid them. Most of us have had the talk: when you encounter the police only say yes sir, no ma'am. Do exactly as you are told. I've practiced it several times. But its different when you encounter an officer. All the fear and anger can easily boil together, especially when you feel like you've been unjustly stopped.

How the Police System has to Change

The policing of Black Americans will likely need to be re-imagined completely because of the deep trauma the Black community has faced at the hands of police. Some say that the issue is that some police officers that are "bad apples." Unfortunately, it is not that simple. I refuse to believe that most of the officers killing Black Americans are horrible racists who want to see Black people dead. These cops have jobs, families, and commitments to uphold. I do not think they would do their dirty work so openly and freely. I do not think they would be willing to risk it all considering the current political climate. I certainly do not think that they would do so during the same with where they see one of theirs on trial, largely unsupported by all his ex co-workers and presumably friends.

Instead, it's that even "good apples" can freak out. That the same fear Black Americans have for the police is may actually be shared by police towards Black Americans. Even those that do not intend to injure or kill during a traffic stop the fear and anxiety exuded by the person they have stopped may be incorrectly interpreted as aggression. My sympathetic system is mirrored by the police officer, also triggered within them. And in cases where they actually hold a gun, and I do not, the result is sometimes inevitable. This is why we see police officers safely arrest and detain non-black people. The officers are working with discipline, making sound decisions.

Officer Fears Resulting in Deadly Work

As I watched the video of 13-year old Adam Toledo getting shot to death by an officer, I couldn't help but also hear the fear and anxiety in the officers voice. A similar tone to the killer of Daunte Wright. But one was trained, doing their job, and had a gun so naturally more expected of that person. Police reform and defunding may be a start to re-imagining how to police Black communities. But those efforts will largely fail if the anxiety and fears that are triggered within officers as they try to detain those that do not look like their son or brother or cousin or uncle are not first acknowledged, addressed, and remedied.

This draft does everything in 980 words that the previous one did in 1440. Cutting it was both a useful experience for you as a writer and helpful to me as an editor, because now we can see more clearly where the issues are.

In most of the societies I have lived in or visited, desire to avoid police is strong in the general population. In that sense, what is most atypical about the US isn't the fear and antipathy Black folk feel about the police, but the sense White people have that police are genuinely their allies.

No Soviet person wanted to deal with militia, ever. To be from the Caucasus, however, therefore being what Russians call a "blackass," was to be even more fearful of the police than to be one of the "ordinary" Slavic people living under the boot of the State.

Societies adopt paramilitary organization for their order-keepers because that works at keeping order. They way paramilitary forces keep order is always only acceptable to those who in their own opinions personify order, because they personify property. For everyone else, that way of keeping order is unacceptable, because it imposes all the costs of order on themselves, their bodies, their families, and their communities.

So we have in the US both a particular form of racialized dualism with respect to police, in which US White people are exceptionally pro police—because we have a rich society in which police are only very occasionally corrupt, rule of law is strong so most police are law-abiding most of the time, and there are communities in which police are visible engaged in protecting and serving—and Black folks have unusually strong reasons to be afraid, even as police forces around the society are increasingly integrated and even led by Black chiefs and commissioners. US police use unusually high amounts of lethal force in the street for police in wealthy democracies, overall, and the racial distribution of that use of force is self-evidently biased, as are the sorts of petty abuses of power with which your essay begins.

It is entirely possible to imagine a transition away from paramilitary order-keeping. Most of the time, in most social locales, the form of immediate social response to harm or danger can be unarmed social intervention by people who don't require power to arrest. But that won't eliminate entirely the need for the State's coercive force to deal with violence and criminal behavior, so we can't expect to remove the paramilitary form of government from the urban street altogether. Which means that the question how to secure actual civil equality in the treatment of all people by those forces doesn't vanish if we "defund the police." The most valuable route to improvement of this draft, I think, is to make some further cuts, which you can do, in order to give space in which to come to grips with the residual problem: no matter how far we cut back, the state will have uniforms on the street carrying guns, and we need to have equal justice under law with respect to, and from, them.

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