Justice, or just us?

By Adrian Corbey

In his recent New York Times article, Charles M. Blow recounted his son’s police encounter on January 24. Blow’s son, a junior at Yale University, was held at gunpoint by a campus police officer after leaving the school’s library Saturday evening. A robbery had been reported on campus and this student fit the description of the alleged criminal—a black male. The officer assumed his guilt and produced his weapon before even exchanging words with him. It was not until he laid face down with his hands up that the officer did anything but bark orders to him. After an informal questioning, during which he produced his college ID, Blow’s son was allowed to return to his dorm.

This event, having transpired at a prestigious university like Yale, begs the question “Where can’t this happen?” This happens everywhere, even here in LM; it has happened to me. Blow’s son was lucky. Had he been anything but perfectly submissive, had he been nervous that there was a gun pointed at him and reacted in a way that the officer found threatening, or been annoyed, angered, agitated, bothered, or flustered by the situation and come off as combative, then he may well have been killed. These are all perfectly rational, natural, and normal responses to being thrust into a life-threatening situation, especially when you are innocent and unprepared.

What happened to Blow’s son was not just racial profiling but evidence of a flawed police system. I do not take issue in being questioned if you fit the description of a criminal suspect, but questioning should be conducted appropriately and be conducted on account of more than just your race. Police too frequently display their trigger-happy, shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality with latent racism. The influence of race in an officer’s decision making is reflective of how society views race. Blow’s son did not pose a threat to the officer, yet the officer’s response was a show of lethal force. The officer felt that Blow’s son, however, was a credible threat and, in order to ease his own fears and mistrust of African Americans, drew his weapon prematurely.

Yale is primarily a school of the white and privileged while the surrounding New Haven is far more black and poor—a relationship that parallels that of LM and Philadelphia. Because of this, Blow’s son was not granted the benefit of the doubt and, as an African American walking through the prestigious campus in the evening, he was immediately presumed “out of the ordinary and suspect.” Due to the officer’s false preconceptions of race, Blow’s son was denied basic human dignity, the assumption of innocence, and the rights of a citizen.

An incident such as this shakes me to my core. I found myself wondering if I could end up in this same situation. What is preventing me from being subject to this kind of mistreatment? Is the only way to ensure safety to have innocent people victimized? As it stands, the only thing that would need to happen for me to end up in this situation is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when that place is somewhere you call home, it makes the issue even more difficult to wrestle with. I could—like many young African American men have done before me and for what I fear they will do for many years to come—get angry over our racial predisposition in life, one where we are an immediate and innate danger for no reason other than we were born in brown skin.

I could be, and still to a certain degree am, suspicious of police officers and try to avoid interacting with them. In the end, this strategy is just keeping a cycle in motion. Anger feeds anger; suspicion feeds suspicion. This issue is not one that has recently been introduced into the American socio-political landscape. Officers’ mistreatment of African American men is something that is so commonplace that it has become a way of life for blacks.

I am no stranger to being thrust into confrontations with officers, and, although they were far less dramatic, their motives very much the same. On one occasion, I was walking with friends to their house a couple of blocks from my home when the four of us (all African American) were stopped by police and were asked who we were and where we were going. We explained to the officer that we were going to the house, and he let us go but not without trailing us the rest of the way. That same day, when I was walking home alone from their house, an officer in a squad car stopped me at the corner, and he provided me again with a watchful police escort on my way home.

Likewise, my own brother had a very similar police encounter. One morning, he was out walking the family dog and caught the unwarranted attention of a policeman. On the walk, the officer stopped and inspected him, idly asking questions about our dog. When the officer had finished his interrogation, my brother turned to go home. My brother was also tracked home. And after he went inside, the officer did not leave but instead lingered, scoping out the house. This lasted long enough for my brother to relay his story to our mother and for her to go outside and confront the officer, asking him if there was any sort of trouble.

I would like to draw to your attention that incidents like this only occurred to my brother and I while either alone or in the company of other African Americans. My brother and I, like Charles Blow’s son, were doing everything right. I was walking peacefully and minding my own business, and, when I was approached by law enforcement, I remained calm and level headed. We were all privy to the knowledge that when speaking with an officer you have to be submissive and calm. This encounter Blow’s son had is one that I empathize with; Blow himself described having an encounter like this as joining the “club”. It is an intergenerational, inglorious “club” of black men who have been mistreated by law enforcement and luckily lived to tell their story; it is a club that hoped to see its membership decrease with each coming year; it is a club that knows all too well the lack of progress our nation has made on this front; it is a club left very disappointed.

Regardless of our achievements, credentials, or lack of a criminal history, absolutely none of that matters when confronted by an officer. I pride myself in being a projection of a model citizen, or at least a non-threatening one, but if that is not enough to keep me from the wrong end of a policeman’s barrel, then why bother? If I am treated in a manner that could only be justified by stereotypes, misconceptions, and bigotry, then why bother to defy these preconceived notions about me?

As Blow stated, “There is no way to work your way out—earn your way out—of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you’ve done matters less than how you look.”

#opinion