Throughout my life I haven't had any serious problems with the law. I mean, of course I've had traffic stops and general mischief incidents, but those are fairly normal happenings that almost everyone has had the inconvenience of experiencing.
It would also be fair to say that I'm pretty concerned about how police treat individuals and the problems that both parties face, especially now with the problems that sprung out of Ferguson this past year. My mind was made up on how racial bias would affect the officer as well as the individual, I based it on simple statistics and the majority of officers fell in a category focused on protecting the people as a whole.
Unfortunately for me, I had a recent incident that has rocked this way of thinking and now I have been trying to make sense of it all.
This past spring break in lieu of people heading down south to Florida or some other warm-weather spring break destination, I decided to visit a close friend in Philadelphia for the week. I needed a break and couldn't justify dropping a couple thousand dollars so I opted for the cheaper option of around $400 for the week including flights.
An important point to make is that he lives around Temple University located in North Philadelphia, which doesn't particularly have the best reputation. Regardless of this, the people in his neighborhood were friendly and in the week I spent there not once did I find myself fearful of my surroundings, even late at night. Then again it might help that I'm a fairly tall and large person, but my friend and his roommates are much smaller and they haven't had any problems, so that may not matter.
Since this wasn't my first time visiting the city I decided that I didn't want to do a lot of the tourist-heavy locations and that going to see the other side of the city would be a better experience, most notably the night-life that I basically hadn't experienced at all up to this point. This meant my days were spent mostly working on class work and the nights were spent going out to bars close and far, along with heading to people's houses/apartments/etc.
On one of these nights we went to a particularly busy bar and the group of people I was with decided it wasn't worth it to stay, so we left and went to go back to one of the girls' houses. On the way there her friend saw our group and offered us a ride as he was going the same way. At this point it's necessary to describe the demographic of the group. The driver was a black male, and the man in the passenger seat was a white male and in the back seat there were two white males, a white female and a black male.
About a block and a half after getting in the car we were pulled over, which to be honest I didn't think even happened in the city. Call me naive, but I figured there were bigger issues than someone driving a little fast at 2 a.m..
The first thing I noticed that was odd was that it was a police van that pulled us over and three officers got out of the car and had us roll down all the windows to see who was inside. Then after talking to the driver for about 10 minutes he had him exit the car and proceeded to search him back at the van. Jump forward about 10-20 more minutes and we're all being asked to exit the vehicle and lined up on the curb to be searched as well.
While we were all lined up on the curb, two other squad cars pulled up for a grand total of six officers (all white men). They then proceeded to search the guy's truck and ask us questions about what we were doing. This is all for a traffic stop on a college campus, just in case you forgot.
At one point during what turned out to be an hour-long endeavor, a large officer paced in front of all of us on the curb and said in an intimidating tone, "The dogs are coming so if you got any drugs on you tell us now, cause they bite." We had no drugs, but we did have McDonalds, and I may be wrong, but I feel like the dogs would probably go for that first.
Not surprisingly, dogs never showed up, the passengers (including me) were never charged with anything, and the driver of the car was given a close-to $200 ticket for having a headlight out after being searched, his car being searched and all of us inconvenienced on not much more than a hunch from the officers.
Now this might seem routine for some people, but this whole experienced really rocked the way I thought about law enforcement officials, the way they perceive people and the absolute power that they have. It gave me a lot to think about and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I definitely don't feel as far away from these problems as I used to.
