Special thanks to my friend Dr. Erica Meiners, educator, prison abolitionist and great ally for this guest post. Erica is the author of several publications including Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies and Flaunt It! Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice. Erica is also the co-founder of St. Leonard’s high school, a program that educates formerly incarcerated adults.

Early in the morning on the 5th of July, I am in bed with my lover, L, fast asleep, generously anesthetized from a summer day.

We are nude in this unairconditioned apartment, and the building, often overflowing with people, is quiet tonight – just two people upstairs, and M and N downstairs in bed with their yappy dogs. I live in a typical two story Chicago building with a “shotgun” style hallway running through each floor, rooms on each side, and kitchen in the back.

Around two o’clock in the morning L yells, “what’s going on” and I wake up. Over the airplane engine sound of the box fan, the floorboards creak, we fall out of bed, and a figure halts in the doorway of our bedroom and all three of us freeze for just a half a moment, and then the body disappears down the hallway with L in pursuit, yelling HEY STOP!

At forty-one, I have had many things taken from me without my consent, and in the spectrum of violations, someone in my house without my consent, and the theft of my laptop and other items is relatively minor. Also, and probably most important to me, I had backed up my work issued laptop that would take a person working at minimum wage at least 200 hours to purchase.

But still, my heart is beating fast and I can’t find my glasses and I am scared and I keep running through my brain different scenarios of what could have happened.

Reluctant to run down the alley nude and without her glasses, L returns, and we get dressed and hum and hah about calling the cops.

Even in this facebooked, craigslisting and tweeterate world, there are no other options to name and publicize what has been taken, to try to get it back and to figure out why it happened. M and N have to get up before the sunshine for work tomorrow, as do the other folks that live around us, so we fester, alone and disoriented, reluctant to wake friends and neighbors.

L votes against calling the cops, but I need a police report to explain the loss of my fancy MacIntosh to my day job, so we wait a half an hour thinking that this will mean that perhaps every loose brown kid in the neighborhood won’t get shaken down or spotlighted by the police helicopter. We (perhaps problematically) assumed “kid” simply because of the height and the way the body was carried, and even if we could have named “race,” the cops will not target the white kids in the area. We breathe, get a drink, and then call the cops and sit on the front steps outside the house to wait and they arrive, a squad car and a paddy wagon, within minutes.

One of the cops tries to be empathetic and makes a comment about how traumatic it is to have someone break into your house.

I think but do not say, yes, sure, but having two large dude-cops in my kitchen is also stressful for me. I want them with their bodies and uniforms and sweat and stilted attempts at solidarity out of my kitchen. I can’t remember my phone number so L takes over giving them information, and I look at my life and see everything a little differently and try to be reassured–the Stonewall was a riot against police brutality poster and the homo sweet homo needle-point art. I think, I am twenty years older now and so what if I have weed in the house?

One of the cops asks if there is a gun in the building. The other cop takes up this question, in this hot hot hot hot kitchen, and states – “well, handguns and rifles are legal now”…. Unstated seems to be ladies like you could use some protection.

With my vision and coordination, and a handgun, I would have shot the kid, L or more probably myself, and this would really have helped the situation.

An excellent our public safety solution: arming ourselves. They classify the crime as a home invasion and leave, slightly admonishing us for not calling 911 earlier so they could search the neighborhood for the perpetrator.

A few days later, in the yard talking through the theft with the queer family, N who grew up in Tennessee in a house where her eight-seven year old mother, Mz M, still answers the door in with her rifle, says she wants us to get a gun. If she has not already on previous extended stays with us brought one, Mz M might even bring her gun with her on the next visit. The table engages in a heated discussion about guns, with two folks on the pro-weapon side, a couple of us on the no-guns and no-cops side, and a few that would, of course, always call the police because what else is there to do? Curiously, the pro-gun duo is very closely aligned with the no-cops folks, as none of us trust the police to protect us or our interests. These are people I love and know intimately and what makes people feel safe is so complicated.

And what do I want? Much, much, much more than 911. Weeks later, I still want to yell at the little shit who bust into my house and stole my stuff and freaked the daylights out of me. I want my stuff back. I want to know who did this and why.

As an abolitionist, one who is invested worlds without policing and prisons, this is the complex place. I write of this experience now with humor, months after the event when the feelings have moved, because I want something else, not 911, and I expect us to build it.