I am in a terrible mood today. I had what turned out to be a very short meeting at my local precinct this afternoon. I asked for the meeting to look for ways to forge a more cooperative relationship with local law enforcement. I want to stipulate up front that I have had and continue to have some cordial encounters with local police. On an individual basis, some officers have been helpful in NOT arresting youth that we work with. Those individual police officers have grasped the idea that ANY contact with the criminal legal system is a bad thing for young people. The police are the gateway to prison for many young people of color. Today’s meeting at the precinct did not go well and I won’t go into the details because I am still trying to process my anger.

As part of the reading that I have been doing for a curriculum on police violence that I am developing, I have come across a number of personal testimonials about the impact of police violence on young people’s lives and well-being. Instead of engaging in an all out rant today, here is an excerpt by Travis Dixon reflecting on his encounters with the police as a young man:

While growing up, even though I was a hardly imposing “geek,” I was often harassed by police officers who assumed that I was up to no good simply because of my race and my neighborhood. On one occasion I was attending a church barbecue. When it was time to head home, I borrowed my grandfather’s truck (with his permission, of course). I was soon pulled over and confronted by two white police officers with their guns drawn; although I was a good kid returning home from a church function, they thought I was a violent predator. It turns out that I was dropping off a friend who lived near a store that had been burglarized earlier that day, and so the Los Angeles police were on a manhunt, looking for a black man, any black man. One inappropriate move, including any verbal protest against my mistreatment, and I might have been beaten, arrested, or even shot. And so my childhood unfolded in South Central, where, on more than a dozen occasions, I faced profiling behavior, was handcuffed, or was pulled over for no reason other than the color of my skin. I thus learned to be careful around the police, to know when to shut up, and both to recognize and fear the inarticulate fury of those who had been trained to see the world through the lens of mass-mediated racial stereotypes. (Dixon 2010, pp.106-107 in Challenging the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Stephen John Hartnett)

This is violence and it is traumatizing. I know that many individual police officers want to do the right thing. But the overall system of policing is corrupt and badly in need of revolutionary transformation. Katheryn K. Russell (2000) cautions us against “the dismissal of police violence as a Black thing.” But we are lacking example of the White Oscar Grant or the White Sean Bell or the White Rodney King.

Police officers need to understand that this is the context that they are operating in when they approach young people of color on urban streets. They will not be given the benefit of the doubt. It is assumed by most youth of color that officer friendly is a myth. They are not wrong. For most youth of color, officer friendly does not exist…

Here is a new video by the ACLU and Elon James White about what to do when one is arrested. They inject needed levity in a deadly serious topic. I am grateful to them for that.