Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  Sekou sees the Ferguson movement and the Don’t Shoot Coalition as an answer to the call made at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention of 2004 against police brutality. But this was not the hip-hop culture that celebrated Malcolm X as the black man who refused to turn the other cheek. If anything, Sekou was talking more like the radicalized, antiwar Martin Luther King Jr. whom people tend to forget. The important differences were “attitudinal,” not generational, Sekou said. He identified what he thought was the real issue at stake in Michael Brown’s murder: “What do you fundamentally believe about black people?”

  Hey hey ho ho

  These killer cops have got to go.

  Few in the chanting, placard-carrying crowd across from the police department on South Florissant Road in Ferguson that evening of November 24 expected the grand jury to hand down an indictment. Many expressed the feeling that whereas a grand jury usually takes from five to ten days in its deliberations, this one used up three months so that everyone could say they’d been thorough before arriving at the decision that they had been going to make in the first place: to protect the police. The uncertainty all day long about the time the announcement would be made was taken as further indication of Bob McCulloch’s manipulation of the whole process. Local news stations were reporting that the prosecutor wanted to wait to make the grand jury’s findings public until after schoolchildren were home.

  But the darkness played into McCulloch’s hands as well. The upscale, white shopping centers like Frontenac Plaza were guarded by police before McCulloch addressed the press. There was no police protection in the strip malls where blacks shopped along West Florissant Avenue, which had been a main trouble spot over the summer. These facts suggest that the authorities wanted the nation and the world—the international press waited in parking lots behind the protesters—to see what a lawless community young black Ferguson would be without a firm hand.

  The police came out of their Ferguson station gradually, a few at a time, in blue riot helmets and wielding transparent shields. I heard people say that even after a sensational case like Michael Brown’s, the police killing of black youth was going on as if unchecked, in the murder of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, who had an air gun on a playground, in the murder of twenty-eight-year-old Akai Gurley in a darkened stairway of a Brooklyn housing project. I heard someone say that we should not forget Eric Garner, killed by Staten Island police last July. (In early December, a grand jury declined to indict the officer who choked Garner to death, even though the choking had been caught on video.)

  Who shuts shit down?

  I saw Alexis Templeton, the young black woman with the bullhorn, leading the chant-dancing in the crowd, and a blond youth chant-danced back at her in response.

  We shut shit down.

  But it was not a party. Solemn young faces peered out from hoodies and more and more handkerchiefs over mouths and noses. I saw masks. The glow of phones was everywhere. The revolution will not be televised, but it will be tweeted, Keiller MacDuff, Sekou’s tireless volunteer communications director, told me people were saying. The night of the grand jury’s announcement, the Ferguson movement did seem to move with the speed of Twitter, but I pressed with others around a car radio in front of the police station. Templeton shifted her bullhorn and helped Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, up onto the car where we were listening. The group on top of the car held on to her. She had been told the outcome already. As she broke down, it was clear to the crowd what the decision was. I stopped trying to hear what McCulloch was saying as Mrs. McSpadden said to the line of policemen in front of the station, “It’s not right.”

  “We’re going to barbecue tonight,” I heard from somewhere behind me.

  While Sekou was giving a television interview in the parking lot across from the police station, where the crowd had begun to press angrily against the police line, we heard gunfire. Sekou swept me along with Keiller MacDuff—she’s from New Zealand—and three young white volunteers from the Fellowship of Faith and Reconciliation. More gunfire sounded behind us as we reached the Wellspring Church, where Sekou had been a guest before, and we were buzzed in. But Sekou and one of the volunteers decided they’d no choice but to get his car parked on the other side of the police station. They left, promising to make it back safely.

  From the steps of the church, I heard glass breaking and saw hundreds of people fleeing down South Florissant. The women in charge of the church in the Wellspring pastor’s absence had instructions to lock the doors, turn off the lights, and not admit anyone else. MacDuff was offended that no more protesters would be let in, because there were young people falling in the street, cowering under the church wall.

  In the church sanctuary, we watched on a laptop the violence a few hundred yards away. Citizen journalists who livestreamed what they saw from their smartphones and iPads had stayed on the street. They have a mixed reputation. Some can say inflammatory things and put protesters in danger or become aggressive, while others understand what it means to have such power in your pocket. People around the world have been glued to livestreams from Ferguson ever since the killing. The police have targeted livestreamers, who can save lives by keeping the spotlight on police activity when traditional media have pulled back from hot spots. A white girl appeared at my shoulder to watch also. I didn’t realize at first that she’d pulled off a gas mask.

  Sekou returned. As we left the church, once again Sekou included me in his group, though there was really no room for me in the car. Out on West Florissant, I saw black youths running out of Walgreens, their legs pumping like marionettes’. I didn’t see them carrying anything, but that does not mean they hadn’t entered the drugstore with the intention of grabbing stuff. A young white volunteer was at the wheel, and black youths shouted from the meridian at the driver’s window at every stoplight.

  Sekou refused to go inside the MSNBC compound on West Florissant to do an interview if we, his people, couldn’t come in, too. At the sound of gunfire, the MSNBC guards dropped to the pavement with us. Sekou didn’t wait to be turned down by MSNBC again and walked us to a parking lot in the rear where we remained for two hours, hiding in the dark behind a brick shed. I recall a fire truck coming at one point, but it went away, maybe driven off by gunfire. Buildings burned on either side of us, huge boxes of acrid flame, and what really confused me was the honking. It sounded like a football victory at times. Except for the gunfire.

  I was afraid of what the police helicopters with searchlights might mistake us for. And then I was wary of two black youths who seemed to be loping in our direction. They weren’t loping; they were making their way along the sides of the parking lot, looking for shelter from the smoke and overhead buzzing. The one with dreadlocks turned out to be a grandson of a pastor Sekou knew. I had to ask myself, and not for the first time, when did I become afraid of black youth? How had I, a black man, internalized white fear?

  Eventually, a loudspeaker voice told people they had to move onto the sidewalk, or else they would be subject to arrest. They had to disperse; they needed to get out of the street. They had to get back into their cars. It had taken the police a while to take back territory. “Riots are the voice of the unheard,” Sekou said, quoting Martin Luther King. I heard many deplore the attacks on black businesses, but those felt random. Glass smashed along a route of panic and retreat. The feeling was that young rioters weren’t after mobile phones; they wanted to burn police cars.

  In the days since, people have been blocking highways, shutting down shopping malls, lying in the streets, and walking out of classrooms around the world. Hands up; don’t shoot. The Missouri National Guard stood behind the line of Ferguson police at the station on Florissant the next night and the night after that, the temperature dropping and the crowd thinning. But nonviolent direct action has won out as the defining tactic of the Ferguson movement.

  I felt a bond with everyone in St. Louis I talked to about what was happening, and that in itself seemed odd. I m
et people who had been moved somehow to come and bear witness: the young rabbi from Newton, Massachusetts; the black single mother who works downtown as a food scientist; the white women of a certain age up from their lesbian commune in Arkansas; the black taxi driver who got from his dispatcher, before it was on Twitter, which highways had been blocked; the white, middle-aged clergyman from Illinois who normally worked in hospital trauma units; the Japanese-born campaign director of the Right to Vote Initiative who was beaten up a lot when a kid in New Jersey in the 1970s because white neighbors thought his family was Vietnamese; the owner of MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse, who opened for business Tuesday morning after having been teargassed twice Monday night.

  “Just for the record, I am so over being teargassed,” Sekou said. “That’s what tear gas is; it’s just tacky.” This from the man who, when the police returned Tuesday night, got everyone in the coffeehouse to lock arms and told the police that he knew they weren’t getting everything they wanted either. He’d read their contract. “This is about a heartbeat,” he told them. He got the people inside MoKaBe’s to strike their breasts. The police went away.

  Back up back up

  We want freedom freedom

  All these racist ass cops

  We don’t need ’em need ’em …

  Following the release of the grand jury testimony, many have argued that McCulloch acted more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor. There have been mutterings about his own history and a possible connection between the Michael Brown case and McCulloch’s personal tragedy of his police officer father having been killed by a black suspect back in 1964. But what in some ways was even more troubling was Darren Wilson’s ABC interview on the evening after the verdict, for which he seemed to have been well coached, including the galling statement that his conscience was clear. An attorney for Michael Brown’s family observed that this was a poor response to his having taken the life of a young man. In his testimony, Wilson “deployed,” as Sekou called it, every racist trope in order to assert that he had been in fear for his life. Brown, Wilson said, looked “like a demon.”

  After the Civil War, thousands of black men were on the roads, looking for new starts but mostly looking for loved ones sold away. Vagrancy laws were passed that said if you couldn’t say where you lived or worked, you could be picked up and put on the chain gang. America has always felt the necessity of keeping its black male population under control. Behind every failure to make the police accountable in such killings is an almost gloating confidence that the majority of white Americans support the idea that the police are the thin blue line between them and social chaos. Indeed, part of the problem in several such cases has been the alarmist phone calls from third parties to police dispatchers, reporting any situation involving a black male in a stereotypical and therefore usually false fashion—the police aren’t the only ones to engage in racial profiling. If you are a black man, be careful what you shop for in Walmart.

  There is a chance that the federal government may vigorously investigate the Michael Brown case. “Please help us fight these monsters,” the hip-hop artist Tef Poe asked President Obama in a recent open letter. But for decades Congress resisted passing any legislation making lynching illegal. The Congress we have now is not going to convene hearings on our police culture or pass a comprehensive public works bill.

  Yet the Ferguson movement has promised that the situation cannot go back to normal, to the way things have been. Everybody knows what racism is. The problems needn’t be explained over and over. They can’t be deflected by saying that Michael Brown took some cigars from a store, that he broke the law and therefore it was proper to kill him with six bullets, although he had no weapon. This is the kind of thinking that racism hides behind. Ferguson feels like a turning point. For so many, Brown’s death was the last straw. Black youth are fed up with being branded criminals at birth. Ferguson was the country stepping back in time, or exposing the fact that change hasn’t happened where most needed, that most of us don’t live in the age of Obama. “It’s a myth that we’re a fair society,” Sekou said. “We have to take that needle out of our arms.”

  2015

  BLACK LIVES AND THE POLICE

  Black people in America have been under surveillance ever since the seventeenth century, when enslaved Africans were forced to labor in the tobacco and rice fields of the South. Colonial law quickly made a distinction between indentured servants and slaves and in so doing invented whiteness in America. It may have been possible for a free African or mixed-race person to own slaves, but it was not possible for a European to be taken into slavery. The distinction helped keep blacks and poor whites from seeking common cause.

  The slave patrols that originated in the seventeenth century would be largely made up of poor whites—patterollers, the members of the patrols were called. To stop, harass, whip, injure, or kill black people was both their duty and their reward, informing their understanding of themselves as white people, something they shared with their social betters. Of course, their real purpose was to monitor and suppress the capacity for slave rebellion. While the militias dealt with the Indians, the patterollers rode black people.

  Police forces in the North may have been modeled on Sir Robert Peel’s plans for London, but because the jobs were connected to city politics, part of the machinery, the policemen themselves, from Boston to Chicago, were Irish, people who had been despised when they first came to America. That they lived next to or with black people told them how close to the bottom of American society they were. In every city the Irish did battle with their nearest neighbors, black people, in order to become American and to keep blacks in their place, below them. North and South, the police were relied upon to maintain the status quo, to control a dark labor force that was feared.

  White Southerners during Reconstruction resented black police officers and their power to arrest a white man. Redemption, the triumph of white supremacy, pretty much eliminated black police officers. In W. Marvin Dulaney’s Black Police in America (1996), the story of blacks on American police forces until the 1970s is one of tokenism and distrust by white colleagues.

  Meanwhile, police forces and their relation to black people in general is a long tale about the enforcement of whiteness and blackness. When in 1968 Carl Stokes, the newly elected black mayor of Cleveland who had won due to a coalition of black and white voters, assigned black police officers only, no white ones, to black districts of the city that had experienced riots, white police officials were indignant. What had the mayor taken from them?

  In the 1960s, the nation was told every summer to brace itself for a season of urban unrest, much of it, as remembered in essays in Police Brutality (2000), edited by Jill Nelson, ignited by confrontations between police officers and black people. There are the names of past victims of police killings that we have forgotten, and there are names chilling to invoke: Eleanor Bumpurs, shot twice by police in New York City in 1984 because she was large and held a kitchen knife. But starting with Twitter keeping vigil over the body of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, and last summer, and already this summer, there is no more denying or forgetting. Social media have removed the filters that used to protect white America from what it didn’t want to see, thereby protecting the police as well. Instead of calling 911, black America now pulls out its smartphones in order to document the actions of the death squads that dialing 911 can summon.

  The camera has made all the difference. A camera can mean that there is no ambiguity about what happened. Feidin Santana just happened to be where he was with his cell phone when Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4, 2015. We see Scott on the police car dashcam video getting out of that black Mercedes with the supposedly broken brake light and running. Then we see, on Santana’s video, Michael Slager firing eight shots into Scott’s back. We don’t see Scott trying to grab Slager’s Taser, as Slager alleged.

  In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5 of this year, two c
ell phones captured two white policemen pinning Alton Sterling on the ground by a parked car in front of a convenience store. Footage from one cell phone is interrupted as one of the policemen yells “Gun!” and several shots are heard. The woman filming from a nearby car has dropped down in her seat, and she can be heard screaming. But the other cell phone, used by the owner of the convenience store, doesn’t blink. It records an officer removing something from Sterling’s pocket after he is dead. One of the things that will have to be determined is where his gun was before he was shot.

  Brandon Jenkins, or “Jinx,” a cool-voiced black anchorman for the online news service Complex News, reported that in possessing a weapon, Sterling was in violation of his probation, given his record—and he offered this information, Jinx added, in the spirit of a transparency that he hoped the Baton Rouge police department would also show. The store owner, whose CCTV footage had been confiscated by the police, said that Sterling armed himself because street sellers of CDs, as he was, had been robbed recently in the neighborhood. Jinx also said that the two white police officers, Blane Salamoni, with four years on the force, and Howie Lake, with three years on the force, both put on paid administrative leave, were heard to say that they felt justified in the shooting. The officers said that the body cameras they were wearing fell off or were knocked out of order during the struggle.

  On July 6, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds went on Facebook moments after her fiancé, Philando Castile, was shot four or five times in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, outside St. Paul, and, with her four-year-old daughter in the back seat ready to console her, she became like a broadcast station from the car: “He was trying to get his ID out of his pocket, and he let the officer know that he was, he had a firearm, and was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm … Please, Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone. Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him…”