My encounter with the police as a poc
I don’t know if anyone cares about this, I don’t have many followers, but i needed to put this out here in a time where everyday we see the injustices wrought by the police here in the US. I am scared of the police. That is a statement of fact that is sad to be true. I figure to best explain my experiences with police is to tell whoever will listen about my first 2 interactions with the police.
I must have been about 7 or 8 when this happened. I was with my best friend, his mother and his step-father. My best friend’s step-father was the money man in a drug operation in downtown brooklyn, he was non-violent but still a criminal (i recognize that). We had gone to see a movie on a family outing, at this point i was essentially a second son or a nephew to these people, we got through the whole movie, we had fun, it was a good day. I remember vividly how as we left the movie theater there was already at least 3 squad cars outside of the theater, and around six officers were outside of the theater weapons already drawn. Now my best friends father was not hiding out from the police, nor had he carried a weapon with him, nor had he shown a threat to any of the police. They could have come to arrest him at anytime, but they chose to do it when he was with 2 young children and his wife. It scarred my best friend who himself was the son of a cop. It instilled an ingrained sense of fear towards the police from that point forward.
This was some years later, I was about 2 years into being homeschooled when this happened. It was around 5pm, around when school/afterschool was over in NYC, I was walking home from a class in manhattan when i got stopped by the police. At the time i was wearing slacks and a long-sleeve shirt, the kind of clothes i argued with my mom about because i thought i looked like a nerd,I had a bookbag and i was small for my age. This was bloomberg era NYC, when stop n’ frisk was in full swing. The officer flashed his sirens and pulled me over. Now let me clarify, I was walking from the train station 4 blocks away from my house, during a time where children would be out on the street (directly after school let out) and i was just walking in my stupid loafers... suffice to say a non-threat and an unassuming person. I was in front of the section-8 housing where i worked for the owner at his soup kitchen/food co-op, and the police officer got out of the car with his hand on his gun telling me to face the wall and spread my legs shoulder width apart and put my hands on the building. He then began to go through my bag and perform a pat-down. This scarred me. I was terrified, one bad move and I was Tamir Rice or Emmett Till. This experience made me question myself, why would he think I was a criminal, did I look like one? Was I a bad person inherently because the cop felt the need to pull me over?
And then as I grew up I saw all of the deaths and all of the injustices perpetrated by the police and the government. As I said earlier my first experience with the cops I was 8 years old, and my second one I was 12. I was a child, not even older than Tamir or Treyvon. The only difference was that i survived my encounter, the universe was kind to me, but it could have just as easily been me lying in a pool of blood a stones throw from my elementary school (1st encounter) or my house (2nd encounter).
My parents wanted me to know from young what my life was going to be like. Where white children get the sex-ed talk at 13, I got my “how not to be killed by the kkkops” at aged 8 directly after my first experience with the police.
When a child at the age of 8 is told that he could be killed by the police for something as simple as putting his hands in his pockets, it forces that child to grow up too fast. Because of the police i lost my childhood, i still have a panic attack when the police are near, and I’m grown. I have never committed a crime, but I’m a criminal in the eyes of the public.
I look to the death of Ahmaud Aubery, and I realize how easy it could be for me to be killed by a racist with an axe to grind. I live in a middle/upper-middle class majority white neighborhood and I live not even 6 hours from where he lived, I live in north carolina where so many civil rights movements have started or marched, and I fear for my life.
Thank you for reading if you did. If not I understand. This was more of a way to express my own personal experiences as a poc.
So in the end. Fuck. The. Police,
down with the fascist government
