Officer Friendly Doesn’t Live Here #2: “The Police Are the Enemy…”
Willie* was standing on the corner in front of his friend’s house. His own apartment was only 5 doors down the street. It’s around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday night during the summer. He has no air conditioner at home and neither does his friend Tony*.
They were playing their music on a boombox. It was loud but no one cared. It’s summer in Little Village (LV); people are used to this. Willie and Tony live in a community beset by violence. Little Village has less green space than any other community in Chicago. A few years ago mothers from the neighborhood had to stage a hunger strike to secure a new high school for their children. Little Village is a mostly Latino community, specifically most residents have Mexican roots. Many of the young people who live in LV are “gang-affiliated.” Regular readers know that I think that this term is mostly meaningless. Writer and Chicagoan Alex Kotlowitz puts it more elegantly:Virtually every teen and young man shot, the police tell us, belonged to a gang, as if suggesting that “what goes around, comes around.” But life in these communities is more tangled than that. You can’t grow up in certain neighborhoods and not be affiliated, because of geography or lineage. (An administrator at one South Side high school estimates that 90 percent of the boys there are identified with one clique or another.) Moreover, it’s often safer to belong than not to belong. You want someone watching your back. And honestly, as Matthews suggests, many if not most of the disputes stem not from gang conflicts but rather from seemingly petty matters like disrespecting someone’s girlfriend, or cutting in line, or simply mean-mugging. This doesn’t explain the madness. Not at all. It’s just to suggest that it’s more complicated and more profound than readings of a daily newspaper or viewings of the evening news would suggest.
“The police just rolled up on me & my vato (Tony). We wasn’t doin’ nothin’. We was just outside listening to music, talking shit, and watching girls,” Willie told me.
Willie is a member of the Latin Kings but so too are most of his neighbors. His father who was killed when he was just a young boy was a King too. All of the Kings are under constant police “surveillance” and subject to harassment by the cops on a daily basis.
Willie said that the cops got out of their cars and dragged him into the backseat:
“They just grabbed me around the neck and they pulled me toward the car. They handcuff me and start patting me down. I ain’t got nothing on me not even my wallet. Tony is goin’ crazy yelling and sayin’ that we didn’t do nothin’ and that the pigs are violating our rights. The officers they just kept telling Tony to keep his mouth shut. I just be thinkin’ they bringing me into the precinct to interrogate me about something that happened again in the neighborhood. That happens to me and everyone all of time.
They had me handcuffed and it hurt like a mother… I was in pain. I told them to loosen it. They ignored me. So I’m in the back of the police car and they ain’t sayin’ a word to me. They just driving. I don’t ask anything but I see that we are not driving to the precinct. They driving me towards North Lawndale. Now I’m getting a little worried, you know. I’m thinkin’ ‘where are these MF’ers taking me?’ We keep driving. Then they stop the car and we are in GD (Gangster Disciple) territory. It’s not completely dark out yet but it’s late, like 8 o’clock or something like that. They get out of the car. They open my door, they pull me out rough like. They take the handcuffs off and they push me hard. I almost fell and cracked my head on the concrete. There are a bunch of GDs out. They just hanging like we were. The cops start yelling to them: ‘We got a King here. We got you a King here.’
I heard about this happening to my other vatos. They drop us off in rival territory and then they bring attention to us to the other gang so that they’ll mess us up. Maybe hoping they’ll even kill us. That’s one less Mexican gangbanger for the cops. That’s one less animal. Cuz you know we’re just animals to them. Animals and cash.
The cops leave me there and they just take off in their car. Now it’s just me and about 12 GDs. One of the guys comes over to me. He says, ‘You know that’s fucked up what those assholes just did. We ain’t finna even do nothin. That’s just fucked up.’ The guy who I’ve seen before, his name is like Jerrell or something like that. We seen each other around the neighborhood like for years. He’s a good guy. He reaches into his pocket and gives me $20 dollars. ‘Hey man, take this and get a cab to get you back home. I can’t give you a ride or nothin. I would but you know I can’t.’ I take the money and I tell him thanks. I tell him I’ll pay him back tomorrow. He says, ‘Nah, don’t pay me back. If they do the same to one of mine & you there, I hope you’ll do the same.’ So we start walking, I see that he’s tryin to make sure I’m safe & protected like to a certain point. When I got back Tony asked me what happened. I didn’t even wanna talk about it. I was just like ‘What? the pigs is tryin’ to get me killed.’ Now I gotta worry about that too. So you asked me about my relationship with the police, that’s my relationship with the police. They tryin’ to get me killed. The police is the enemy.”
After Willie told his story, I just sat with my mouth open, stunned. I could not believe it. I had never heard of this happening. I have since heard this same story repeated a couple of times by other young people though so I know that it is true.
A couple of years ago, in June, I hosted a focus group with young men in conflict with the law. There were about 12 of them, all were Latino, and most were “gang affiliated.” I was writing a report for a local group about how to engage juvenile justice-involved youth in decision-making bodies (like commissions, boards, and taskforces). My friend Matt, who runs a terrific program called the Urban Life Skills, was kind enough to allow me to speak with some of the youth he works with. It was during this conversation that Willie told his story. I’ve relied on my notes from that focus group to recount Willie’s words on that day. His story stays with me still. It was one of the many inspirations for the Black & Blue project that I spent late 2011 and much of 2012 working to develop.
In 2013, I am continuing to foster spaces for discussion and critical engagement around our relationship to policing and violence. During a couple of weeks in March, I am organizing (with some allies) a series of intergenerational events about policing, violence and resistance. I hope that you will spread the word about the events and attend some of them if you can. Even those who aren’t in Chicago will be able to participate in one of the events which is an online discussion of the Frontline film “Law & Disorder.” I believe strongly that popular education is a critical aspect of movement-building. It provides an opportunity to shift public consciousness about the prison industrial complex and to locate our current crisis in historical context. It is my sincere hope that these events contribute positively to our current movement-building to dismantle the prison industrial complex. In the meantime, it is enough to remind ourselves that for most of our young people, officer friendly has never lived here…
* Not real names…