On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  On an unusually warm Sunday afternoon in March, Aisha and I sat on the wide cement steps of her four-story subsidized apartment building. Her boyfriend, Tommy, leaned on the railing beside her, chatting with a neighbor who had stopped on his way home. Aisha’s aunt and neighbor sat farther up the steps, waiting for their clothes to finish at the Laundromat across the street. We passed around a bag of jalapeño sunflower seeds and kept our eye out for Aisha’s cousin, who was supposed to be coming back with a six-pack from the corner store. Time dragged on, and Tommy remarked that she’d probably taken our pooled money and gone to the bar.

  As we sat watching the kids play and spitting the shells into little piles beside us, Tommy unfolded a notice he had received that day from family court, a notice that he must appear before a judge because the mother of his two-year-old son was asking for back payments in child support. If he came to court empty handed, he told us, the judge might take him into custody on the spot. If he didn’t show up, a warrant might be issued for his arrest for contempt.

  “She just mad you don’t mess with her no more,” Aisha said. “She knows you pay for all his clothes, all his sneaks. Everybody knows you take care of your son.”

  “When is the court date?” I asked.

  “Next month,” Tommy answered, without looking up.

  “Are you going to go?”

  “He don’t have six hundred dollars!” Aisha cried.

  We tried to calculate how many days in jail it would take to work off this amount, but we couldn’t remember if they subtract five dollars or ten dollars for each day served. Aisha’s aunt said she thought it was less than that. Aisha concluded that Tommy would lose his job at the hospital whether he spent two weeks or two years in jail, so the exact amount he would work off per day was of little consequence.

  Tommy looked at Aisha somberly and said, “If I run, is you riding?”

  “Yeah, I’m riding.”

  A neighbor’s five-year-old son started to cry, claiming that an older boy had pushed him. Aisha yelled at him to get back onto the sidewalk.

  “If they come for me, you better not tell them where I’m at,” Tommy said quietly.

  “I’m not talking to no cops!”

  “They probably don’t even have your address. They definitely coming to my mom’s, though, and my baby-mom’s. But if they do come, don’t tell them nothing.”

  “Shoot,” Aisha said. “Let them come. I’ll sic Bo right on them.”

  “Yeah?” Tommy grinned appreciatively and nudged Aisha with his shoulder.

  Aisha’s aunt turned and eyed her skeptically, shaking her head.

  “I’m not letting them take him,” Aisha fired back. “For what? So he can just sit in jail for four months and lose his job? And don’t see his son?”

  Aisha and Tommy began dating shortly after I first met her, when she was a high school freshman. What she liked about him then was that he was gorgeous, for one, and dark skinned, even darker than she was. Tommy, she said later, was not only her first; he was also her first love. They kept in touch for years afterward, though Tommy had a child with another woman, and Aisha began seriously seeing someone else. When Aisha turned twenty-one, this second man was sentenced to fifteen years in a federal penitentiary in Ohio. About six months later, Aisha and Tommy got back together. Soon after that, Tommy began working as a custodian at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. When he got the call for the job, they cried and hugged in the living room. Aisha had never dated a guy with a real job before, and became the only woman in her extended family with this distinction.

  . . .

  “If they lock me up, you going to come see me?” Tommy asked her.

  “Yeah, I’ma come see you. I’ma be up there every week.”

  “I know that’s right,” Aisha’s neighbor said. “Them guards up there going to know your name. They going to be like, ‘You always coming up here, Aisha!’”2

  We laughed quietly.

  Later that evening, two of Aisha’s girlfriends came by. She told them about her conversation with Tommy: “He talking about, ‘if I run, is you riding?’ Shoot, they ain’t taking him! They’re going to have to kill me first.”

  For Aisha, the news that Tommy may be taken came as a crushing personal blow. But it was also an opportunity to express her devotion, meditate on their relationship, and contemplate the lengths she would go in the future to hold it together.

  Other women considered their family member’s pending imprisonment in more political terms. Mike’s mother, Miss Regina, was in her late thirties when we met. A reserved and proper person, she had made good grades in high school and got accepted to a local college. She became pregnant with Mike that summer. The way she told it, Mike’s father was the first person she had ever slept with, and she hoped they would get married. But the man became a heavy crack user, and was in and out of jail during Mike’s early years. By the time Mike was ten, Miss Regina told his father to stop coming around.3

  By all accounts, Miss Regina worked two and sometimes three jobs while Mike was growing up, and she raised him with little help from her own parents. Mike got into a lot of trouble during his high school years, but managed to get his diploma by taking night classes.

  By the time Mike came of age, the drama with the mother of his two children and his frequent brushes with the authorities had caused Miss Regina “a lifetime of grief.” By twenty-two, Mike had been in and out of county jail and state prison, mostly on drug charges.

  When we met, Miss Regina was working for the Salvation Army as a caretaker to four elderly men and women whose homes she visited for twelve- or eighteen-hour shifts three times a week. She had moved to Northeast Philadelphia a few months before we met, noting that the 6th Street neighborhood had become too dangerous and dilapidated. The house she was renting was spotless; she even had a special machine to clear away the smoke from her cigarettes.

  Miss Regina had just gotten home from work, and had started a load of laundry in the basement. Her mother and I were watching the soap opera Guiding Light on the plush loveseat in the living room when the phone rang. From the kitchen Miss Regina yelled, “I don’t believe this.” She passed me the phone; it was Mike, who told me his PO (probation officer) had issued him a warrant for breaking curfew at the halfway house last night. He had come home from prison less than a month ago; this violation would send him back for the remainder of his sentence, pending the judge’s decision. When we hung up, Miss Regina lit a cigarette and paced around the living room, wiping down the surfaces of the banister and TV stand with a damp rag.

  “He’s going to spend two years in prison for breaking curfew? I’m not going to let them. They are taking all our sons, Alice. Our young men. And it’s getting younger and younger.”

  Miss Regina’s mother, a quiet, churchgoing woman in her sixties, nodded and mumbled that it is indeed unfair to send a man to prison for coming home late to a halfway house. Miss Regina continued to pace, now spraying cleaning solvent on the glass table.

  Let me ask you something, Alice. When you go up the F [local slang for the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), the county jail], why do you see nothing but Black men in jumpsuits sitting there in the visiting room? When you go to the halfway house, why is it nothing but Black faces staring out the glass? They are taking our children, Alice. I am a law-abiding woman; my uncle was a cop. They can’t do that.

  On seventy-one occasions between 2002 and 2010, I witnessed a woman discovering that a partner or family member had become wanted by the police. Sometimes this notice came in the form of a battering ram knocking her door in at three in the morning. But oftentimes there was a gap between the identification of a man as wanted and the police’s attempts to apprehend him. Before the authorities came knocking, a letter would arrive from the courts explaining that a woman’s fiancé had either missed too many payments on his court fees or failed to appear in court, and that a bench warrant was out for his arrest. Or a woman would phone her son’s P
O and learn that he did indeed miss his piss test again, or failed to return to the halfway house in time for curfew, and an arrest warrant would likely be issued, pending the judge’s decision. At other times, women would find out that the man in their lives was wanted because the police had tried and failed to apprehend him at another location.

  In fifty-eight of the seventy-one times I watched women receive this news, they reacted with promises to shield their loved one from arrest. In local language, this is called riding.

  Broadly defined, to ride is to protect or avenge oneself or someone dear against assaults to person or property. In this context, to ride means to shield a loved one from the police, and to support him through his trial and confinement if one fails in the first goal of keeping him free.4

  It may come as a surprise that the majority of women I met who learned that a spouse or family member was wanted by the police initially expressed anger at the authorities, not the man, and promised to support him and protect him while he was hunted. In part, I think these women understood how easy it was to get a warrant when you are a Black young man in neighborhoods like 6th Street; they understood that warrants are issued not only for serious crimes but for technical violations of probation or parole, for failure to pay steep court fines and fees, or for failure to appear for one of the many court dates a man may have in a given month.5 A second and related reason for women’s anger is that the police have lost considerable legitimacy in the community: they are seen searching, questioning, beating, and rounding up young men all over the neighborhood. As Miss Regina often put it, the police are “an occupying force.” A third reason is more basic: no matter what a woman’s opinion of the police or of the man’s actions, she loves him, and does not want to part with him or see him subjected to what has been referred to as the pains of imprisonment.6

  Riding is easy to do in the abstract. If the authorities never come looking, a woman can believe that she will hold up under police pressure and do her utmost to hide the man and protect him. So long as the threats of police pressure and prison are real but unrealized, a woman can believe in the most idealized version of herself. The man, too, can believe in this ideal version of her and of their relationship.

  A few days after Tommy received the notice from family court, he went to the police station and turned himself in. The police never came to question Aisha. They did come for Miss Regina’s son, Mike.

  WHEN THE POLICE COME

  I’d spent the night at Miss Regina’s house watching Gangs of New York with Mike and Chuck for maybe the hundredth time. I had fallen asleep on the living room couch and so heard the banging in my dream, mixed in with the title page music, which the DVD played over and over.

  The door busting open brought me fully awake. I pushed myself into the couch to get away from it, thinking it might hit me on the way down if it broke all the way off its hinges. Two officers came through the door, both of them white, in SWAT gear, with guns strapped to the sides of their legs. The first officer in pointed a gun at me and asked who was in the house; he continued to point the gun toward me as he went up the stairs. I wondered if Mike and Chuck were in the house somewhere, and hoped they had gone.

  The second officer in pulled me out of the cushions and, gripping my wrists, brought me up off the couch and onto the floor, so that my shoulders and spine hit first and my legs came down after. He quickly turned me over, and my face hit the floor. I couldn’t brace myself, because he was still holding one of my wrists, now pinned behind me. I wondered if he’d broken my nose or cheek. (Can you break a cheek?) His boot pressed into my back, right at the spot where it had hit the floor, and I cried for him to stop. He put my wrists in plastic cuffs behind my back; I knew this because metal ones feel cold. My shoulder throbbed, and the handcuffs pinched. I tried to wriggle my arms, and the cop moved his boot down to cover my hands, crushing my fingers together. I yelled, but it came out quiet and raspy, like I had given up. My hipbones began to ache—his weight was pushing them into the thin carpet.

  A third cop, taller and skinnier, blond hair cut close to his head, entered the house and walked into the kitchen. I could hear china breaking, and watched him pull the fridge away from the wall. Then he came into the living room and pulled a small knife from its sheath on his lower leg. He cut the fabric off the couch, revealing the foam inside. Then he moved to the closet and pulled board games and photo albums and old shoes out onto the floor. He climbed on top of the TV stand and pushed the squares of the drop ceiling out, letting them hit the floor one on top of the other.

  I could hear banging and clattering from upstairs, and then Miss Regina screaming at the cop not to shoot her, pleading with him to let her get dressed. All the while, the cop with his foot on me yelled for me to say where Mike was hiding. It would be my fault when Miss Regina’s house got destroyed, he said. “And I can tell she takes pride in her house.”

  TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION

  If the police decide to go after a man, chances are they will ask his relatives and partner where he is. Because these intimates are immersed in the lives of their legally precarious family members and partners, they tend to have considerable knowledge about their activities and routines. They know where a young man shops and sleeps, where he keeps his possessions, and with whom he is connected.

  These days it isn’t difficult, expensive, or time consuming for the police to identify family members who may have information about the whereabouts or incriminating activities of a man they are after. Nor does it require direct knowledge of the neighborhood or its inhabitants gained through close association. Rather, information about a man’s relatives, children, partner, and relationship history can now be easily retrieved with a few keystrokes.

  When the police arrest and process a man, they ask him to provide a good deal of information about his friends and relatives—where they live and where he lives, what names they go by, how to reach them. The more information he provides, the lower his bail will be, so he has a significant incentive to do this. By the time a man has been arrested a number of times, the police have substantial information about where his girlfriend works, where his mother lives, where his child goes to school.

  Once a man has become wanted, the police visit his mother or girlfriend, and try to persuade her to give him up. In the words of one former Warrant Unit officer, “We might be able to track people with their cell phones or see every guy with a warrant in the neighborhood up on the computer screen, but when it comes down to it, you always go through the girlfriend, the grandmother, because she knows where he is, and she knows what he’s done.”7

  After the police locate a family member or partner, they employ a series of techniques to gain the woman’s cooperation. These begin when the police are searching for a man or arresting him, but may continue through his trial and sentencing as they attempt to gather information that will facilitate a conviction.8

  The most direct pressure the police apply to women to get them to talk is physical force: the destruction of their property and, in some cases, bodily injury. From what I have seen around 6th Street and nearby neighborhoods, police violence toward women occurs most frequently during raids. During these raids and also during interrogations, they deploy a number of less physical tactics to get uncooperative women to talk. The major three are threats of arrest, eviction, and loss of child custody.

  Threats of Arrest

  During raids and interrogations, the police threaten to arrest women for an array of crimes. First, they explain to a woman that her efforts to protect the man in her life constitute crimes in their own right. When Chuck’s mother, Miss Linda, blocked the police’s entrance to her home and waved an officer away as he pulled up her carpet and opened up her ceiling, the officers explained that they could charge her with assault on an officer, aiding and abetting a fugitive, and interfering with an arrest. They also told her that she would face charges for the gun they found in her house, since she didn’t have a permit for it. (In fact, in Philadelphia a
permit is required only for carrying.) When Aisha’s neighbor said she would refuse to testify against her son, officers told her that she would go to jail for contempt. Once she agreed to cooperate, they informed her that if she changed her statement she would be jailed for lying under oath.

  Beyond her efforts to protect the man in question, the police make it clear to a woman that many of her routine practices and everyday behaviors are grounds for arrest. Over the course of raids and interrogations, the officers make women realize that their daily lives are full of crimes, crimes the police are well aware of, and crimes that carry high punishments, should the authorities feel inclined to pursue them. When the police came for Mike’s cousin, they told his aunt that the property taxes she hadn’t paid and some long-overdue traffic fines constituted tax evasion and contempt of court. The electricity that she was getting from her neighbor two doors down, via three joined extension cords trailed through the back alley (because her own electricity had long been cut off, and for the use of which she was babysitting her neighbor’s two children three times a week), constituted theft, a public hazard, and a violation of city code.

  The police also explain to a woman that she can be charged for the man’s crimes. Mike’s girlfriend told me she was sure she would be charged for possessing the gun or the drugs if she didn’t give Mike up, since the police found them in her house and car. The police also threatened to bring her up on conspiracy charges, claiming that they had placed a tap on her cell phone and so had proof that she was aware of Mike’s activities.

  Police raids also place a woman’s other male relatives in jeopardy. When Mike had a warrant out for his arrest and the police were showing up at his mother’s house, she became very worried that her fiancé, who was driving without a license and who was also selling small quantities of marijuana as a supplement to his job at the hospital, would come under scrutiny. Because it is very likely that the other men in a woman’s life are also facing some violation or pending legal action (or engaged in the drug trade or other illegal work), the police’s pursuit of one man represents a fairly direct threat to the other men a woman holds dear.