Atwell drove south on Sherman Avenue. Ahead, a parked car blocked the right lane. He accelerated, passed a car on his left, then moved into the left lane. He did not notice a police car behind him. “Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?” a Black officer asked after stopping him. A Latino officer stood slightly back, observing, his hands tucked inside a bulletproof vest, a stance of superior rank, literal or assumed, Atwell could not tell. He answered the inquiry, explaining to the officers that he was headed to see a friend but was not in any rush. The Black officer asked Atwell for his identification. His proof of insurance and car registration were in the glove compartment, and as he contemplated reaching for them, he thought of Philando Castile, a man who was killed trying to do the same thing while also reporting his lawfully carried firearm.
“Officers, I am going into the glove compartment to get my registration and insurance,” Atwell said. He had no idea why he had been pulled over, and his tone betrayed irritation. He insisted that the officers acknowledge what he said before he moved. The Latino officer, hands still in his vest, said, “Well, you see where my hands are.” Atwell repeated his assertion, asking them to acknowledge his statement, and the Latino officer repeated his. On the third try, Atwell said he did not care where the officer’s hands were, he wanted to be sure the officer knew why he was reaching into the glove compartment. From Atwell’s perspective, he was trying to comply with authority and live another day. The Latino officer became agitated with the dark-skinned Black man before him who spoke as if he thought of himself as somebody. In Atwell’s view, it did not matter that both officers were men of color. The police operate under their own codes, he thought. Atwell handed over his identification and waited as they retreated, presumably to run a data search. Ten minutes passed, too long to be a routine license check, he thought.
Upon returning, the Black officer ordered Atwell to exit his vehicle. Atwell asked why, and the officer said in order to relay what he had done wrong. “I don’t have to get out of the car for you to explain what I did,” Atwell resisted, still mystified as to why he had been stopped. He did not view his brief acceleration and lane change as exceptional. The Black officer repeated his order with more power, “Get out of the car.” Atwell complied, expecting a lecture. “You are under arrest for reckless driving,” the Black officer said evenly.
“I was shocked and livid,” Atwell told me during an interview in March 2020. They cuffed Atwell’s hands behind his back; “crazy tight, it hurt my wrists,” he said. A white policewoman arrived and was assigned the role of putting Atwell in the back of a police car. Athletic and 6 feet, 1½ inches tall, he tried to position his long legs in the confined space between the barricade and the back seat. He could not sit normally with his legs in front of him. “Just get in the car,” the female officer said, exasperated, and belted him in. As the police drove him to jail, he thought of Freddie Gray, his body contorted, legs turned forty-five degrees from his torso, and arms cuffed behind his back, knowing how damaging an impact from a car accident could be in this position.
I asked Atwell if he ever told the police he was a medical doctor. He said it did not occur to him, that he had never used his profession to curry favor. His friends jokingly call him “Letter-of-the-Law Larry.” Atwell had tried to do everything right in his life. He was born in the US to Trinidadian immigrant parents. His mother, especially, had instilled in him pride, dignity, and a fierce work ethic. As a child, he was an honor student who skipped grades. He graduated from St. John’s College High School at age sixteen, sixth in his class, and attended Howard for both college and medical school. That even he was being grabbed by this system underscored to him its pervasive injustice.
“I think they arrested me to show me a lesson [for speaking up for myself],” he told me. He had never been arrested before; he didn’t even have an unpaid parking ticket. At most, he thought the officers might give him a citation. Instead, they took him to a police station, where he was searched, fingerprinted, and booked. After asking multiple times, Atwell was allowed to call his brother, who is a lawyer. There was nothing to do but wait to be released, his brother explained. The system was processing him and others; he would be released that day unless they found an outstanding warrant for his arrest, his brother told him. Atwell sat alone in a holding cell from about 7 p.m. until 1:30 a.m., caught in the bureaucratic motion of the carceral state. On release, the same officers who arrested him returned his personal items. Atwell stared angrily at the Black officer, who looked away. Atwell wanted to hold the brother accountable, wanted him to feel some guilt for participating in this farce, but the Black man in blue displayed no remorse. Atwell detected a smirk and smug satisfaction from the Latino officer. Disgusted, he walked blocks to the arrest scene to collect his car.
“I felt so dehumanized, degraded and defeated,” Atwell told me. “I thought of all the people who have gone through this . . . from fugitive slaves onward,” he said of famous and ordinary Black Americans we learn about who have endured capture. “This whole system that is meant to make money . . . and assert authority and dominion over others. And it is meant to humiliate you. Those officers, I could see it in their face. I don’t honestly think all police are bad, but they forever tainted how I feel about [the police].”
This is Dr. Darryl Atwell’s telling of his story. I did not attempt to discern the officers’ version of events, and ultimately the prosecutor chose not to pursue the case. That added to Atwell’s anger about the arrest. It was totally unwarranted in his view and his distress about police treatment was cumulative. “In my experience, I’ve had no good experience with police officers,” Atwell said.
He shared some of his personal police history with me. While completing his two-year cardiothoracic fellowship at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in the mid-1990s, he experienced ongoing discrimination, that is, “driving while Black.” After the third or fourth time that local law enforcement stopped him, he mentioned this experience in passing to the head of his program, who volunteered to speak to the police department on his behalf. “It was random stuff,” Atwell said. Once he was stopped for driving “too slowly.” Another time he was stopped, he was told, for driving “suspiciously.” He never received a ticket for these stops.
The stops seemed more frequent in Cleveland, Ohio, where Atwell worked for eight years at Cleveland Clinic. Upon moving there, he immediately noticed the stark segregation of the city. The clinic, one of the highest-ranking research hospitals in the United States, was located “right in the hood,” as Atwell put it, in an economically depressed area on the East Side of downtown Cleveland. The East Side is overwhelmingly Black. Atwell chose to live there, five minutes from Cleveland Clinic. Later he bought a house in the integrated, eastern suburb of Shaker Heights because he was advised that its property values would be more stable than in depressed eastern Cleveland.
The West Side was very white, including ethnic Slavs and Poles. “Cats from Cleveland did not go to Little Italy,” Atwell said of his Black brethren who tended not to venture beyond the East Side. As a man who went where he wanted, Atwell often felt like an explorer.
In his recollection, he was stopped about six times in eight years. The most harrowing, he said, was a stop on the West Side. He recalled driving to a restaurant or club and had just crossed into the west. This time, a white policeman claimed that Atwell had driven on the wrong side of the road, improbably, against oncoming traffic.
“You get sick of it,” Atwell said of the memory, “being accosted about something you know you didn’t do.” He handed over his driver’s license, with his Cleveland Clinic medical ID inadvertently stuck to it. Atwell asked the officer several times to return his work ID and the officer ignored him. Fed up, Atwell taunted the man: “Give it back to me; you will never need a doctor’s ID because you will never be a doctor. After this is over, I am going to be a doctor, and you will be out here, on the streets, being a cop.” He admits he was trying to belittle him, something ordinarily
he would never do. In the moment, mean words were Atwell’s bid for dignity. To his credit, the police officer did not escalate hostilities, though he continued to pursue the stop wherever it might take him. The officer tried to search the car, pointing a flashlight in and pulling on the door handle. “No, you may not search my car,” Atwell asserted.
The officer ordered him to exit his vehicle, in those days, a light blue Mercedes CLK 320. Soon five white police officers surrounded him. Atwell became the center of a too-familiar American scene for the voyeurs who drove by. A Black man, hands placed on the hood of his car, legs spread, police exploring his body with their hands, searching for weapons that were not there. Did they enjoy it?
In this instance, Atwell says he felt like trash. They had complete dominion over him, and he felt his life was in peril. The story reminded me of a similar one told to me by one of my law students—another Black male who said he had been stopped nineteen times and, in the worst episode, sat crying on the hood of a police car, handcuffed, certain he was going to die. Philando Castile was stopped more than forty-six times by police before an officer shot him to death; only six of the stops were for offenses an officer could have observed before pulling him over.3
This time, Atwell received only a citation, which he challenged in court. The police did not show up, and the judge dropped the charge, but not without a parting accusation: “Be careful which side of the road you drive on in the future,” meaning the judge presumed the police report was true. This, too, angered Atwell, who had prepared a soliloquy but held his tongue and bolted from the courtroom.
Atwell returned to Washington in 2006, and while he endured fewer traffic stops in the formerly Chocolate City, they were never pleasant. He did not understand the automatic antagonism he seemed to encounter in his interactions with police. He recalled being detained in 2017 for not signaling before turning at a stop sign. He had come to a full stop. The intersection was clear. He forgot to signal. “Have you ever been locked up?” was the officer’s first belligerent question, he recalled. “I’m not going to answer that question,” Atwell replied, again, a sarcastic assertion of dignity. “Oh, you want to make things difficult, I can do that,” the officer escalated. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Atwell recalled wondering, “Don’t the police have better things to do, crimes to solve . . . why start out with such hostility?”
Atwell was so upset by this interaction that he pursued a mediation. In the District of Columbia, a citizen complainant has the option of sitting down with an officer and a mediator to discuss what happened as a form of restorative justice. Atwell asked the officer why he began a traffic stop with a question about whether he had a criminal record. “If I was a 16-year-old-girl, would you have asked me that question?” he interrogated. “There are a lot of bad people,” the officer declared, claiming he used that opener to protect himself. Atwell challenged him: If he did have a criminal record, he could easily lie about it. Why assume that he was bad? Under the prodding of the mediator, Atwell says the officer acknowledged that his approach was inflammatory. The mediation left Atwell only partially satisfied. He felt it had been worth the effort to get one cop to rethink his interactions with Black citizens. And yet it was only a year later, that another cop escalated a traffic stop, arrested, and humiliated him on Sherman Avenue.
“Would it be fair of me to say all police officers are bad?” he wondered aloud as we concluded our interview. “If Black people based [their opinions of all whites on] their experience with some whites,” he reasoned, “we would say all whites are bad and should be avoided. But we don’t do that.” He applauded Black Americans for affording others what is often denied to themselves. “Black people are not given the benefit of the doubt even when it [accords with] rational evidence,” he argued, proceeding to give examples of his experience as a Black doctor in a white coat. “Whose jacket are you wearing?” he was once asked of the doctor’s coat he wore with his name embroidered on it. “Who is the doctor on this case?” “Are you a tech?” He described episodes where people, usually whites, reached to explain away what should have been obvious: the Black man before them was a doctor and the person in superior position to decide what would happen under the circumstances. White people about to undergo surgery, after being introduced to Atwell, the doctor who was going to administer anesthesia, would often ask incredulously, “Where did you go to school?”4
Darryl Atwell
Black folk, men especially, are often viewed through a lens of suspicion and can experience what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls “nigger moments” as they go about their business. A learned association of Blackness with criminality, Anderson asserts, is incubated in the iconic “ghetto.”5 In a study of Chicago neighborhoods, sociologists Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush found that perceptions of neighborhood disorder, like race itself, were socially constructed and rose with levels of concentrated poverty and percentages of Black and Latinx residents.6 Ideas constructed to justify creating and maintaining the hood can attach to Black skin, wherever the Black person is encountered.7
Black women also suffer disproportionately the burdens of aggressive policing. Sandra Bland was stopped for changing lanes without signaling, ordered to put out her cigarette, arrested when she refused, and found hanging dead in her jail cell three days later. Atatiana Jefferson was killed in her home about 2:30 a.m. by a Fort Worth cop during what was supposed to be a check on her welfare; he saw a Black person in the window and shot instantly.8 Breonna Taylor was shot and killed when police invaded her home in the middle of the night.9 These women and untold others are members of a grim eternal Black sisterhood.
Elijah Anderson’s insight illuminates another sinister aspect of American residential caste. The hood, once constructed, facilitates not only unequal distribution of resources, opportunity hoarding in affluent white space, and ideas about Blackness, it also contributes to a different style of policing of Black people and an overinvestment by the state in law enforcement and incarceration. And it contributes to systemic private surveillance of Black Americans by self-appointed citizen patrollers, often with the encouragement of the state.
POLICING THE HOOD AND DESCENDANTS
A study commissioned by the ACLU of Washington, DC, aligns with Anderson’s theory. Researchers invoked a freedom of information statute to access Metropolitan Police Department arrest records for the years 2013–17. They found that Black people were arrested at ten times the rate of whites and that such racially disproportionate arrests occurred in 90 percent of all the city’s census tracts. Whether in very white space, very Black space, or multiracial spaces in between, Black bodies were more likely to be arrested.10
For example, Black Americans, who then comprised 47 percent of the city’s population, accounted for 76 percent of arrests for noise complaints. They accounted for 99 percent of those arrested for gambling. Among the other categories of relatively minor nonviolent offenses for which Blacks were disproportionately apprehended or cited: possession of an open container of alcohol, consuming marijuana in public (in a city where private consumption is now legal), and driving without a permit. Nearly four-fifths of the ten-thousand-odd souls arrested for not carrying a permit while driving were Black. And yet the police officers who stopped Black drivers could not have known beforehand that they were missing a permit. This sharp disparity led researchers to speculate that Black people were being stopped more often for behavior for which others might receive a pass and that these stops helped drive Black arrest rates higher.11 As I discussed when debunking ghetto myths, and wearily repeat here, Black people do not commit violent, much less nonviolent, crime at dramatically higher rates than whites and certainly not ten times the rate of whites.12
The Supreme Court has enabled differential policing in Black neighborhoods with its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. The Court has held that if police observe someone in a “high crime area” and can articulate an additional factor arousing their suspicion, this meets the “reasonable susp
icion” standard necessary to render a stop of that person constitutional.13 It is a no-win situation for residents of poor Black hoods. Police stop and search more frequently in majority-Black areas, leading to higher rates of arrest. A hood becomes a “high crime area,” raising probabilities of even more stops and death at the hands of police.
In recent years, police killed about one thousand people annually in the United States, a number that far exceeds per capita police killings in most developed countries.14 Researchers have found a correlation between racial segregation and police killings. Police are more likely to use violent force in a majority-Black neighborhood than in majority-white space, especially if the neighborhood is poor. And police interactions are more likely to be fatal in the hood. Segregation enables police to use a style of policing that would not be tolerated in white space, and segregation helps explain why it is that Black people, especially men, are much more likely than white folk to be killed by the police.15
In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which were spurred by the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney King for a reported fifteen minutes, Congress passed a law giving the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) authority to investigate police departments for patterns or practices of unconstitutional policing and seek consent decrees to redress them. About forty of the country’s roughly eighteen thousand police departments have entered consent decrees or other settlement agreements for pattern or practice violations.16 The Obama administration’s DOJ investigated police departments and negotiated nineteen consent decrees or similar directives. Each consent decree included proposed reforms and required law enforcement agencies to take remedial measures, without any admission of guilt. The DOJ’s investigative reports on errant police departments illuminated an often-predatory relationship between police and descendants in the hood, though the Trump administration disavowed this work.
White Space, Black Hood Page 20