On Policing
“Why are your hands yellow?” the high-school cop demanded, more than once, stopping me in the hall. This was the first time I heard the term “freebase” outside a Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song, and to be honest, I thought they were singing “free bass.” It was late in the school year, after the AP test, and we had tied-dyed shirts in Statistics.
Years later, it’s half past midnight and I’m filling up my tank somewhere in the armpit of the San Francisco Bay. A police car circles around the gas station, foreboding, looking for trouble. As I leave, sure enough, lights flash me from behind. Not just the red and blue – a bright white spotlight that blinds me. I can’t see the lines and my left turn is a bit wide.
“Do you know why we pulled you over?” I think I know – it’s got to be my turn, right? – but it seems risky taking a guess. I say that I don’t know.
“Your tags are expired.” The tags on the back of Smokey Robinson, my car, read “Sept” and “2022.” It’s the second day of September 2022. These tags are not, in fact, expired.
They ask me a lot of (irrelevant) questions. They have so many questions they don’t even let me answer, they just plow ahead with another question. It’s tense for a while, but as the temperature cools down, they admit they’re out here looking for DUI’s and drugs. Fix my registration (again not expired) and my dinged-up light (okay, sure), and they probably won’t pull me over next time. Cool.
The next day, I’m peeling off the Obama-Biden sticker from my bumper. It’s from 2012, the first election I could vote in. I did cast a blue ballot in the deep red state of Utah, but it’s actually not my sticker. The old owner of the car is an avid outdoorsman who grew up with limited means but a lot of character in an old school Mormon family. He’s a Westerner, but it’s as if he grew up in the cowboy songs of a labor-loving leftist like Woody Guthrie, or perhaps in the oratory of Eugene Debbs. He fell in love with the jazz scene in Salt Lake – not that overly-technical showoff stuff, mind you, but “real jazz.” He had strong opinions and smoked strong cigars, and that’s partially why my car’s name is Smokey. That and the six-track CD player that included a Smokey Robinson album.
Obama will understand. He texts me. But I feel like I’m betraying the man who taught my brother and I how to fish. A man who was unafraid to tell all the other Utahans exactly how he felt. And lest you mistake him for an armchair pundit or out of touch with his countryfolk, a good part of his academic career was in highlighting the ways that rural communities disproportionately suffer from the effects of nuclear waste. He fought hard for the common folk he disagreed with – that’s what it means sometimes to support labor.
But he is also an older white man, and he knows the handshakes. I am shipping off to rural Nevada for work next week and I am recalling all the times I’ve been harassed at gas stations. I’m also recalling the red and blue lights in the rear-view mirror on a rainy highway in rural Mariposa County. I texted my dad, but not my mom – I know how she worries. You never know if this is the time you wind up in jail, or worse. The text didn’t go through. No service. The cop takes his sweet time.
That time I had to pay a processing fee to send in supporting documentation about my vehicle registration. The paperwork had been recently stolen in a smash-and-grab. To date, I haven’t actually been charged with a crime or traffic violation (other than a parking ticket or two). But I still pay.
Tonight, I was texting my brother from the driver’s seat of my parked car. It’s the thirty-third anniversary of my great-grandmother’s passing this weekend. On the Buddhist calendar, there are certain dates that are significant. I’m driving down, but there’s an online Zoom option. I wanted to make sure he knew all the details.
Suddenly a bright light beams me from my left window, but in the darkness, there’s motion out the right window. It’s an ambush. I have to make a split-second evaluation, and it happens automatically, but luckily that fight-or-flight part of my brain recognizes these predators before my conscious mind does and I don’t do anything stupid, though I have already opened the door and hear myself call out, defensively, asking them to explain what’s going on.
I’m being detained. Why?
Why are you being so hostile? Are you hiding something? Why are you sitting here alone in this parking lot? What are you doing? Do you work here? Were you working late? I’m going to take that as a no. Why are you being so suspicious? Can I get some ID? Let me see your ID. You’re recording? So are we. (Cool, like that will ever show up when you murder me.)
Two men with guns pincered me in my car and I’m the one that’s being hostile. They make it clear that I am being “detained” but I’m not under arrest and I’m not a “suspect.” They need to “control the scene,” which is why they can’t stop shining the flashlight in my eyes in a decently lit parking lot, even after we’re just sitting there, conversation awkwardly ground to a halt. They need it to see inside the car. I offer to step out. Heck, they can search me, search the car. Okay, but you have to sit on the curb, and we’ll still shine the flashlight on you.
Turns out they are responding to an alarm that went off. And it turns out my friends set it off. Oops. I had just helped them unload drums but was the last to drive away, taking a moment to send a few emails and texts. By the way, the police station is literally down the street. We had been talking in the alarmed building for over ten minutes.
As things cool down, the chiller of the officers makes a reasonable case for me to see it from their point of view. They get called in for an alarm and see a car just sitting in the parking lot. Who knows – maybe I have a gun? (Maybe the whole car is rigged with explosives!) So of course, they have to play commando, giving each other hand signals and sneaking up on either side of the car – getting to say TV lines like “you’re being detained.”
But, to tell the truth, I can see it from their point of view. But I think it’s even harder for them to see it from mine, from the long arc of a lifetime of policing.
Sometimes when I’m frustrated with how the world works, I ask my parents. I guess that’s an old habit – an infant’s first cries realizing that, in life, there is suffering. They suggested that I don’t travel so late at night and to make sure my car is presentable. (They’re policing class.)
But I don’t want to live in that world! (There, there, little baby.)
Okay, but this is just the bad experiences, right? What’s a normal experience with the police? Here is my modal encounter: police cruise by slowly in a parking structure while we’re playing music. Sometimes they tell us to vacate. Sometimes it’s a noise complaint. Sometimes it’s just not where we should be playing music. Sometimes they remind us to stop by a certain time. Many times, they just drive by, watching.
One night, I was playing taiko in one of the lower floors of a parking structure. I was invited to perform okedo at a King’s game in a collaboration with the Sacramento Mandarins just a few days before the show, and I needed to practice! There were no police that night, but a woman in distress came up to me and asked where the emergency room was. I offered to drive her but it wasn’t that – her son was admitted. He was in critical condition. She was from out of town and there was some confusion as to which hospital he was in. She made it to the right town, but just needed to get to the hospital. So I drove my car and she followed behind. It was a somber procession. When I got her to the right entrance, I asked if there was anything else I could do. “No,” she thanked me, “but thank you for being my guardian angel.”
I don’t know her name or what happened to her son. I hope they are together today. I can’t quite explain, but at some level, music is about being present – being here in this moment of time. You play a note, but as you adorn the passing moments, they fade away. The pieces exist between moments of time. But being present can make all the difference.
Perhaps musicians in parking structures are angles in the architecture, bits of human consciousness in the otherwise deserted monuments of Public Places in Private Hours. Perhaps you don’t want them vacated. Perhaps you don’t want people off the streets. Perhaps you don’t want people to move along – to stop loitering and get back to their homes. Maybe that’s just one way we are present for each other, when we need it the most.
I understand the appeal of fighting crime, and I understand the necessity of some level of law enforcement. But when policing becomes ubiquitous and unquestioned, what else do we lose? Have we become so focused on shooting blue jays that we’ve forgotten that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird?
"Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
We deserve to live free from fear of police.
