Columbus Decapitated

The frame up on this one is a doozy. Bear with me. [A question, future moi: Is there a pandemic, a recession, a once-in-a-quadrancentennial protest movement, not a small number of crackdowns and an orange Nazi in the white house? No? Blessings.] 

I write from somewhere within the pensive rhythm of curfew and lockdown on an island in the Bahamas. If you'll recall, class, this was the first bit of earth Columbus ran in to 528 years ago. We are recovering from YET another once in a lifetime hurricane, dodging a pandemic, staring down the barrel of a protracted recession, and I'm feeling pretty left out of all the civil disobedience in the lower 48. The largest civil rights movement in history and I'm quarantined with my sea turtles. Such a Try Hard.

Columbus has just been decapitated in Boston. His hands painted red in Miami. And I'm grappling with how brutal we must be to divest from a brutal history. 

The Black Lives Matter movement has coalesced around a call to "defund the police." And it resonates. When I became a history teacher in 2008, the links between slavery and the failings of the criminal justice system ran through a feelings fog of words like "disenfranchisement" and "marginalization." I was sitting lotus-pose under a false flag of racial equality, among multi skin tonal crayon boxes and feeling very smug.

But they're not just links, really. It's the same shit. Systems and structures intentionally built by actual stone cold racists, maintained by new carbon copies who still aim to exploit the bodies of black Americans but retain resource control for white Americans. Further enabled by a nation of idiots who thought they could pretend it was just that "urban areas" happened to be mostly black + under-resourced, and the election of Barack Obama was the clarion call of the new post-racial era.

Then the Nazis came. And the liberals were surprised. And our black friends were betrayed both because we let it happen, but also because we were surprised when it did. 

What is Public Safety, anyway? That feeling of safety in public spaces, how do we build it? Who is actually for? What do we lose when it's not for everyone?

A cop took an interest in me once. He pulled me over twice in a month, once he arrested me. He'd also cruise by my office around 5pm. He'd held on to my sweatshirt and tried to give it to me in person. When I refused, he dropped it by my house with a handwritten note and his number. I called Internal Affairs, but they declined to pursue it. "It just sounds like he's been very nice to you."

None of it is on my record. Not because the system worked, but because he structured every citation and the arrest so that he maintained authority over the process. When he issued the first two citations, he offered that he "may just forget to show up at this court date." That was hanging over my head when he arrested me two weeks later.

The night he actually took me in to custody, someone headed it off. He was reassigned, and visibly frustrated by it. A young, clearly uncomfortable, white female cop took over. She broke character twice to acknowledge that this was at least weird. She made a phone call after a breathalyzer test. I left out the front door ten minutes later. "I've never seen someone walk back out of those doors before," said my non-white friend when he picked me up outside. I still had another court mandated interaction with this officer to look forward to, and he popped up in my daily life two more times. 

This was not police brutality, nor racially motivated. But I feel unsafe around American cops now as a rule. There are bad cops. And those cops enjoy too much latitude and too little temperance. Both the female cop and the supervisor that sent him away that night clearly knew this guy was fucked up. But they still had work with him, to try to subvert him. The system is broken. There's really nothing you can do if a bad cop takes an interest in you. Whether motivated by sex, by trauma, by fear, by hatred.

I also love good community police work. And my heart breaks for all the trauma our committed officers endure. You may think you know what a shift is like for an officer, but I'll bet you don't. I've only been on two ride-alongs and I think we can share this load a bit better. Half of those calls were better suited for an MSW - a belligerent teenager, a domestic disturbance. A quarter needed conflict resolution - because these neighbors live on top of one another and will just keep calling the police to sort their spats. But instead of those tools, our police go in with a taser, a side arm, the semi-automatic from the trunk of their crown vic.

I see no reason to protect our existing criminal justice system. It is illogical and harmful. I think to the officers as well. One ex-CIA turned police officer I like recently said: 

"If your reaction to community oversight & criticism of police work is to get mad & tell that community good luck with crime cuz you’re not gonna work under such conditions, do everyone a favor & just quit now. Who do you think you work for if not the community that hired you?"

I'm not sure I disagree, but I think the legacy of police work in the United States is built on some dark, centuries old shit that's not working for anyone. Not Breonna Taylor or George Floyd. Not the lady cop who looked out for me. Not the officers whose tier-one tool on hand for an angry teenager is a gun.

And I don't know how we fix it all, unless we tear everything down to the studs and restart. Because these roots go back a long ways. Our history is alive. Our history is brutal.