I take everything going on with the police and the black community very seriously, so forgive me, but I’ll skip the pleasantries and slow introduction to my topic and just say it: there is absolutely a problem between the black community and the institution of policing that stems from racism and a warped perception.
Growing up as an African American your family has to prepare you to live along with society at large. They have to prepare you for how to behave because you are inherently perceived differently as a black person. My parents, as I’m sure many other black families did, had a talk with me when I was 16 and received my driver’s license. They told me not to have too many friends in the car, not to play my music too loudly, and what to do when I stopped by the police. They said that I had to be polite, I have to treat them with respect, and no matter what they ask I have to comply. I knew even at 16 that police weren’t allowed to search my car without a warrant and I knew I did not have to consent to a search, but my parents said that didn’t matter and if I did not listen to them things would only get worse. As young black men, my friends and I would always be looked at more critically by police, not because we were criminals, but because of our skin.
My high school career was spent at Brooks College Prep located on 111th and King. It was located in the middle of Roseland, a place known for its crime, so naturally the police would patrol around the neighborhood often. My parents’ talks made me weary of dealing with the police, but nevertheless I encountered no problems when driving to school. My friend Josiah would be there with me every day in the passenger seat. We went school, we came home, and that was it every day and that was it for a whole year. But, the next year it finally happened. We finally got stopped.
It was technically the second week of school, but CPS had been out of session due to a teacher’s strike. Josiah and my other friends Charles and Kanton went out to a bowling alley in Dalton one night during the week. Time slipped away from us and we didn’t leave until 11 at night. Unfortunately for us, Kanton lived in Roseland a mere 15 minutes from school. By the time we figured out where we were going and dropped Kanton off at his home it was around 12:15. We began our way home and were trapped behind the slowest car we could find. I sped up to about 30 mph to get in the left turn lane and finally be free of the slow car, but sure enough, the car was full of detectives who promptly pulled us over.
There were 3 men that came out of the car. The officers approached with flashlights all around the car and by the time one got to my window I was frantically nervous. The officer that came to my window started shouting for my license and registration. After he took the documentation to the car to search it another officer screamed at us to get out so he could search us and the car. I was hesitant at first, but Josiah nodded at me that we should just comply. They had us place our hands on the vehicle and spread our legs, at the same time another officer searched my mother’s car. As they began their search we noticed 2 more cars showed up, not detective cars these were squad cars. I knew that if they were going to hold us that they would place us in the squad cars, so I was outright scared by this point. The officers finished searching us as well as the car and got in our faces. They yelled asking where the drugs were, what we were doing out so late, where we came from, and where we going. One of the squad car officers asked if we had ever been to jail, to which we replied no. After telling us we were lucky they didn’t find anything, they sent us on our way.
RELATED: Segregated Campus Housing in 2016?I told my mother everything that happened when I got home and she was irate. Eventually, after a lot of talking, I finally went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I was white and if I wasn’t in Roseland.
As an adult I now realize what led to me getting stopped that way. Roseland, like many other neighborhoods in Chicago, suffers from crime. But more than that, poverty always leads to a rise in crime because when people can’t eat they get desperate. Chicago is filled with “Roselands:” primarily black neighborhoods with little money and high crime rates. The reality is that over-policing these neighborhoods doesn’t solve anything because the underlying problem of poverty - the motivation for the crime - still exists. It creates a warped perception about a race of people and what they are likely to do in the eyes of the law. To say that this perception problem doesn’t exist is to ignore the way black people are treated by police, the statistical evidence the Bureau of Justice provides illustrating black people are stopped more, and the fact that when proportioned for the higher overall population of white citizens with black citizens, black people are several times more likely to be shot by a police officer.
