Police behavior must be modified

Friday, March 13, 1998

Police behavior must be modified

LAPD: Crime prevention policy makes lawlessness a
self-fulfilling prophecy

First off, I’d like to recount an incident that happened to me
about a month and a half ago. I had gotten off work at 11 p.m. on a
Sunday (Super Bowl Sunday, to be exact) and a co-worker was giving
me a ride home. We exited the 10 Freeway at Overland near my house.
As we were exiting, we saw a police car pulling someone over. As we
got off, they pulled over and as we drove by we noticed that four
young African American males were seated inside. Aware that the
LAPD has gained quite a reputation of mishandling people of color,
we slowed and watched what was about to transpire.

We stopped at a gas station and sat in the car watching for a
while. I can only describe what we saw from a distance of about 100
hundred feet because we weren’t really sure what the legal minimum
distance away was, so we played it safe and kept a pretty good
distance. Nothing happened for a good 10 minutes or so while the
cops waited for another car to come.

Once there were four officers, each of the four seated in the
car had to get out of the car separately. They were then searched
and told to sit on the curb. After all four people were out of the
car, they checked everyone’s IDs and then had them sit out there
while the cops searched the entire car. This took a long time, as
the one cop who searched the car was very thorough. He looked
everywhere – inside the car, in the trunk and under the hood.
Apparently they did find a bottle of champagne. However, the bottle
was unopened, as we heard the pop when the officer opened it to
pour it out.

This seems wrong to me as I don’t think it is against the law to
have a closed container of alcohol in your car.

After all of this was done they still held them for several more
minutes. I assume they were saying things to them, probably
threatening them. Finally they were free to go at around midnight.
These innocent people had been held for no reason for an hour.

The worst part of this whole episode was revealed afterward,
after they came up and we talked to them for a couple of seconds.
My friend and I were extremely pissed off that the cops had done
this. An hour of their lives had been taken from them for no
reason.

The horrible thing was that they weren’t even mad, or at least
didn’t seem so. This was an everyday thing to them. They basically
told us that it wasn’t a good thing but it happens all the time and
there is nothing to be done about it. This was the most
demoralizing thing.

Of course, officers often do subject some to such random,
unjustified searches. But it doesn’t happen to everyone. I’m lucky.
I look white.

Strangely enough, I haven’t ever been pulled over in such a case
– but after talking to those people, it seemed quite obvious that
the people who tend to get pulled over by the cops are not singled
out because they have violated any law which is written in law
books, but because they have committed the onerous sin of having
black or brown skin in a land which is dominated by those with
fairer skin.

It’s strange how the number of cops gets larger and larger in
the areas of this city where people of skin tones other than white
have been forced to live by the economic policy of the land.

It’s also strange how, in my experience, the vast majority of
cops tend to be white. As long as we have a police force made up of
white officers telling people of color what to do, it doesn’t seem
to me like there will be much success in preventing crime.

If you belonged to a community which has been oppressed by white
people for centuries, if you still lived in poverty in East L.A.
(or Compton or Long Beach or Watts) while nearly all of the people
living in opulence in places like Beverly Hills and Bel-Air are
white, would it make much sense to obey the guardians of this
economic order, namely the police?

But putting that aside, we like to think that people try to do
well for themselves and try not to commit crimes. However, it seems
to be accepted logic that if you continuously tell a child that he
is dumb then that kid is probably going to start believing it and
eventually will end up fulfilling the adjective which had been
placed on him. (This happens to be a nugget of conventional wisdom
that I actually do agree with.) If this is true, why is it that we
aren’t doing anything about police constantly being suspicious of
people based on their physical appearances? If you consistently
tell kids that you think they are doing something illegal, if this
is what you expect them to do, then that expectation will probably
eventually be fulfilled.

And of course I haven’t even touched on the issue of police
brutality. This issue in itself is deserving of much more than a
single column, much less one part of a column. The number of people
who have been murdered by the police in this country in the past
few years is quite astounding. The Stolen Lives Project has been
attempting over the last couple of years to catalog as many of
these cases as possible. There are simply hundreds and hundreds of
cases. The number of people who have been abused and not killed is
obviously much higher and also astounding. The few cases which have
gotten widespread media attention are horrendous, but these are not
the only times that this sort of thing goes on.

So I guess the point of all of this is don’t accept what someone
says or tells you to do just because they have a badge. You might
want to pay more attention to them for another reason, however –
the fact that they carry guns.

But despite this vulgar display of brute force, there are ways
to resist. Know the law, do anything you can do legally to resist
them. Also, watch out for each other. Don’t just look the other way
when you see helpless people being harassed by cops. Always make
them accountable for what they do. Let them know that if they are
going to be brutal, you will be there to witness it. Get involved
with groups that are out there exposing what police do and fighting
for change.

I once had a professor who said it was stupid to fight against
the cops because that was like fighting against overseers during
the time of slavery. In other words, the cops aren’t the ones who
create the system, they don’t have real power, they are just the
enforcers of a system created by others. This is very true and I do
believe that cops are often just dupes who follow orders. However,
my question is: Was it wrong for slaves to fight back against the
overseers even if possibly they weren’t the orchestrators of the
whole thing? By my way of thinking they may not be the only ones
who are guilty, but they still have a lot of blood on their
hands.Ruiz can be reached at [email protected] for questions or
comments. He’d love to hear what you think.