“What’s your opinion?”. It’s a question I’ve frequently faced amongst the rise of violence facing our nation in the past couple of years and more intensely the past couple of weeks. It seems everything was pretty distant until it finally hit close to home; first in Baton Rouge, then in Dallas. The question is also typically followed by another more complex question, “Are you upset no one is saying #HispanicLivesMatter?”. It’s difficult to try to address these questions. I don’t believe they’re easy for anyone. Especially with the backlash you can expect depending on your answer. First, I have a lot of opinions, but I don’t have a solution, and I accept that a long rant on a Facebook status or a brigade of tweets will do little solve any problems, so to voice them into a sea of angry mobs is pointless. Secondly, in theory, if I were to start a hashtag shedding light on the 79 Hispanic people killed by police so far this year, as noble as the intention might be, it would come off opportunistic and would be like adding gasoline to a fire that we can’t already control. Yes, I’m upset that people are killed by police officers, but it doesn’t mean I’m not also upset that officers are killed as well. The loss of any life in this world is a tragedy.
I’ve avoided these questions for some time until I had a run in with some police officers a few days ago when I started to think of all my experiences with police. It was a hot Friday night when my best friend and I were walking back from Walmart with two bottles of wine to enjoy the rest of the evening. We grew up on the same block and we’re still very old school when it comes to the neighborhood. We walk everywhere, we know all the neighbors, and more than anything, we know when something isn’t right. While walking up his driveway, I heard a car slowly creeping up behind us. Our street is significantly darker than others, mostly due to the fact that we only have two street lights with one of them almost always being off. But, I could tell it was a cop car. I could tell the shape of it, even in the dark. I could almost even feel it. All of a sudden the light that sits next to the hood off the side of the vehicle turned on and flashed us. After a matter of seconds, it turned off. We were scared stiff, and I wanted to try to reach for my phone to record whatever incident may happen next, but I was paralyzed. The vehicle stopped in front of us as one officer stepped out and asked my friend his name. Once he confirmed, she smiled and said, “We’ve got something for you”. At this moment, we completely lost control of our bowels. What could that sentence possibly even mean? To me, “we’ve got something for you” meant a picture of our bodies on the cover of the newspaper with two kilos of cocaine and nine warning shots in our backs. But, then at this moment I noticed something shuffling in the back of the car as she went to open the door. A small girl plopped out, noticeably inebriated. The officer told us that she had informed her that my friend was a family member (he wasn’t) and we were told the girl needed to sleep it off. We weren’t given many details, but what shocked me was that I realized that I had never seen anyone get off the back of a cop car without handcuffs on. What was even more shocking was when we found out that the spotlight turned on and then off was because the young girl TOLD the officers to turn it off. I don’t want to know my fate if I were ever belligerent in the back of a cop car mouthing directions at officers.
We gave the girl water and let her rest as we sat outside debating what would have happened had we been in her situation. We highly doubt that we would have been given the same courtesy. But, we don’t know that for sure, and thankfully we weren’t in the situation to find out. We began to go over all the events currently happening around the country and debating whether proper practices were performed or if justice was needed. This was never a conversation I thought I would have, but here we were. A bit of background on our perspective. We grew up in a neighborhood that was predominantly black, Asian, and Hispanic. Most of the white population was retired and in the sixty to eighty range. In fact, the only time I really interacted with kids my age that was white was at school. But, this is something I notice in retrospect. We didn’t see that we were Chicanos, or Asians, or black, or white. We just were some kids on the block always ready to get into something. I’m not going to be one of those people who claims they “don’t see color” because I personally believe we should take pride in our compositions and that our differences make us unique even though we are all equal. But, these differences were irrelevant to us as children, and they were mostly irrelevant until high school. That’s when we began to see changes. I was never one to wake up on time for the school bus, so I’d walk to my school a neighborhood over. I’d often get picked up by classmates on the street as they would frantically ask me if I was crazy and how I wasn’t scared of being mugged or killed. I wasn’t scared for many reasons. First, I was a kid with maybe a couple of wrinkled dollars in my pocket and a backpack full of textbooks I would love for someone to steal from me. Second, even if muggings were prominent in my neighborhood, which they weren’t, was I supposed to be afraid of my own block and treat everyone like a threat? What kind of way to live is that? In my four years in high school, I heard more and more racist and insensitive comments mostly from kids that belonged to a completely different tax bracket than we did. But, it wasn’t until my college years when I was shocked to hear the kinds of things people would openly and comfortably say about minorities.
I suppose one could say the ethnic composition in our neighborhood was the reason we saw so many patrol cars circulating around our streets. It was a normal sight and it didn’t make me feel any more or less safe. If something was ever going to happen to me, it was going to happen swiftly. Street crime doesn’t take its time. And even though I had many unpleasant encounters with officers, I never grew to hate them. Mostly because I don’t believe in hating groups of people. There are definitely many individual people that I hate, but it’s irrational to me to clump everyone together. I’ve also met a lot of super cool cops as well, and I have a lot of respect and love for them. Especially the ones that would let me take a picture as if I were getting arrested so I could send it to my mom.
Most of my encounters with police officers were minor and not memorable. It was typically questioning me asking if I had seen any suspicious behavior or had seen or known someone they were looking for. My first real encounter was when working at an Italian restaurant in high school, I was unloading unwanted supplies from my coworker's vehicle onto mine so that I could return them to the Sam’s Club across town. As we were unloading I noticed a brown car parked with a man inside holding what looked like a walkie talkie. I told my coworker and as I started to approach it two officers came out of different sides of the building with their guns drawn. They told us to put our hands in the air and to empty our pockets. A command that seemed to contradict each other, but I digress. As I began to nervously take out my possessions I felt a hand grab the area where my neck and shoulder met and slam me on the hood of the car. I heard a voice yell “Hands where I can see them!”. I didn’t say anything because I was too angry and confused to speak. Our trunks were clearly open, and I know the prosciutto market has been rising, but it’s hardly enough weight to constitute that kind of behavior. They let us go and told us they had someone call in and say it looked like a drug deal was being made in that parking lot an hour beforehand. As I said before, street crime doesn’t take its time.
My second major encounter with police officers didn’t necessarily involve me, but it was two different instances that happened during the same weekend that two completely different outcomes. At that same restaurant, there was a cook who called himself Kool-Aid. I’m not quite sure as to why or how he acquired this name, but all I knew was that he was a really good cook and a great guy. He towered over me at about 6’5 and maybe about three hundred fifty pounds of muscle. After we closed Kool got clipped for possession of a minuscule amount of marijuana on the way home. I didn’t see Kool for six months after that. The next day during my school’s homecoming dance, the party was cut short because illegal substances had been found on one of the charter buses. Officers were pulling kids that were dry humping to Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” out of the dance floor into a conference room full of glass doors where you could see kids crying as they were being frisked. I told my crew that this party was dead anyway and as I tried to leave a walrus looking officer slammed me against the wall and accused me of trying to sneak off with drugs. He searched me and let me go, but there was a certain fire in his eyes that felt like he wanted me to have something. I never saw the drugs on the bus, but there are different accounts as to what and how much was really in there. Some say just a couple of stolen prescription pills, some say that it was enough to sedate an elephant. Regardless of how much it was, I saw every single kid that got busted that night the next day.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, and I can only speak of the situations I’ve lived. To me, this issue is not black and white and I don’t mean that from a racial view. I mean that there is a lot of gray here. As I said before, I don’t have a solution and only offer my perspective and experiences, but this is a big ogre of an onion America needs to deal with and start peeling layer by layer. Racism still exists in this country, but not every event has been racially motivated. Some officers are justified by their actions, but some are not. Some people are innocent, some people are guilty. We can’t clump every incident together because we won’t get anywhere that way. We also can't dehumanize people with differing views as ours. We also can’t judge each other for the loud radical voices that exist on both sides. Even though they scream the loudest, they do not speak with reason or the sentiment of the larger population. I do believe we should mourn the loss of every life. I do believe we should march when there is an injustice, but that it should always be peaceful and organized. I do believe we should find credible agencies to investigate every situation. I mean, you wouldn't let Bernie Madoff investigate himself, right? I also believe we should stop ending lives and pointing fingers at each other. Like my boy from back in the day George W. Bush said, “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions”.
