Have a Nice Car
It seems like half the time black people get pulled over, it is because of a broken taillight. Why? Bad car maintenance is getting people killed!
How do you keep a car maintained? Well, sure: have money. That helps a lot. But even if you don’t have money, you can do a minimal amount of preventative maintenance to keep your car good-looking enough to not get pulled over.
Even though it’s basically the whitest radio show ever, black people could benefit from listening to Car Talk on NPR. Click and Clack, the Tappett brothers, hand out car advice to listeners in the corniest way possible, but heck, they could be lifesavers.
Auto maintenance for white people starts with the engine. Auto maintenance for black people starts with the taillight. The cops won’t pull you over for a fucked-up engine, but they will for a broken taillight. A broken taillight is basically a broken car to you.
Other frequent targets for cops: burned-out headlights, broken windshields, expired tags, and missing front license plates. If you’ve got a junky car, you’ll recognize that list. And look: you know you’re really dark when your windows aren’t tinted and they think they are. You’ve done enough with the dark. Stay away from it.
It’s important to have a nice car. But maybe not too nice a car. Too nice a car can seem suspicious. So don’t go overboard.
Drive Right
Another reason a lot of black drivers get pulled over is that they “don’t obey the traffic laws.” They improperly switch lanes, for instance. Or they are driving too fast. Or like in Florida recently when state attorney Aramis Ayala was pulled over by the Orlando Police Department because she had a, um, her tags, well, the, um, tags came back empty? And her window tint was, it was just weird. Or something.
So be sure to observe all traffic laws. Be sure to signal if you need to change lanes. Better yet, don’t change lanes. Drive straight. Don’t turn. Turning can get you in trouble. Everywhere you go has to be straight forward. And so, if you’ve got to visit somebody and you have to make a left turn, they’re off your list. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Stay straight!
Oh shit, now I sound homophobic. We can worry about the gays later. Oh shit, they’re here. Well, it’s better than being shot. An angry tweet from GLAAD—I’ll take that over a bullet from a cop.
Don’t Have Too Many People in Your Car
Don’t have more than three people in your car. Yes, there are seats for at least five people in even the smallest car. But if you have too many people in your car, you will attract the attention of the police. There’s something about large gatherings of black people that they don’t like.
Have a White Friend
If you’re going out, bring along a friend. If you have a couple of choices, bring along a white guy. A white dude is helpful to vouch for you in case you get pulled over. Carrying around a white guy might be even more important than carrying around your driver’s license. You might not want to bring your white friend, but he’s like a fire extinguisher—break seal in case of emergency.
Attention men: please note that I said bring along a white guy. We’re not talking about a white woman. That could put you in a worse situation. And never, ever let these things come together at the same time:
1. Well-dressed
2. Nice-looking
3. Black body
4. Nice car
5. White woman
A well-dressed, nice-looking black dude with a nice car and a white woman: that’s a problem. You can have two of those five things, maybe three of those five things, but you can’t have five of those five things. That’s suspicious as fuck. Unless you’re an NBA ballplayer and your team has just won the championship, in which case all bets are off. But if you aren’t one of the three guys in the entire world that has happened to, you’re in trouble.
It’s like those symptoms you look at on WebMD that scare the shit out of you and convince you that you’ve got a horrible disease. You can have one or two of those symptoms, but if you have them all—shit, you have lupus. If I were you, I’d get a cream for that rash. But I digress.
Don’t Be Lost
Never be lost. Black people cannot get lost. Always know where you are. Always know where you’re going. Getting lost is different for white people. When Christopher Columbus got lost, that motherfucker got America. When black people get lost, somebody dies or goes to jail.
If you’re black, you’ve got to be organized. Always know where you’re going and what time you left to get there. You want to have your route planned so you’re on the road the shortest amount of time. Get friendly with Google Maps. Remember, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; if you’re going straight like I told you, you won’t have a problem.
And whenever possible, stay on streets named after famous black people, like Martin Luther King Boulevard or Malcolm X Boulevard. Or in a pinch, streets named after Mexicans or whatever. Caesar Chavez Boulevard is still safer than John C. Calhoun Street. And if you’re on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, get the fuck out.
studiostoks/Shutterstock
Having Trouble with the Po-Po?
Are you like me, always getting pulled over by the police for driving while black and then getting jammed up on some made-up bullshit? Maybe you’ve tried everything:
Crimestoppers bumper stickers
Police Benevolent Association window decals
Being polite
Complying with police orders
And you’re still having trouble. Even I, D. L. Hughley, can run into trouble. One time, Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca gave me his business card in case I ever got in a jam. I don’t think I’ll be able to take him up on his offer, since he’s in prison for lying to federal officials in a jail corruption scandal. But even if I could, there’s no guarantee that he could help before I was being arrested for something. Every black person needs a powerful solution.
Africa Studio/Shutterstock
Well, it sounds like we need: Po-Po-Potpourri!
If you want to keep your car fresh, it’s good to have an air freshener. But get one that’ll help you if you get in trouble. White people might want Vanilla or Autumn Breeze or some other Yankee Candle bullshit. Potpourri: that’s not for you. You need Po-Po-Potpourri!
How many times have you been arrested because cops “smelled marijuana”? How many times does this mysterious smell occur even when there is no weed in the car. Don’t give cops a reason to arrest you or worse! Get Po-Po-Potpourri!
Po-Po-Potpourri is the only air freshener that rids the air of the invisible smell of marijuana that only appears in the police report.
Po-Po-Potpourri Will Set You Free
7
If You Do Get Shot, Don’t Rush to Judgment
“An exhaustive Department of Justice investigation exonerated Wilson of any wrongful conduct. A similar thing happened in the case of Trayvon Martin. At trial, his killing was found to be done in self-defense, notwithstanding the rush to judgment the other way. The moral: We need to hear both sides.”
—Richard A. Epstein, “The Shooting of Blacks by Cops and the Rush to Judgment,” Newsweek, July 13, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/shooting-blacks-cops-and-rush-judgment-479746
What if you or someone else you know does get shot? This book is about not getting shot, but sometimes even a book can’t help you avoid the consequences of systemic racism and bias. If you do get shot, white people want to make sure you don’t rush to judgment. After all, not all cops are bad!
Don’t Rush to Judgment
Nobody wants to rush to judgment. But to black people, if an armed man has shot an unarmed man, there has already been a rush to judgment. So what authorities are actually saying is that they don’t want there to be a rush to judgment on their rush to judgment.
Two wrongs don’t make a right
If a cop was a little too quick to judge and his judgment was final—that is, fatal—well, that doesn’t mean you should be like him, minus the fire
arm: two wrongs don’t make a right. What did Jesus say? “Judge not lest you be judged”? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” although I wouldn’t because that is assault with a deadly weapon and you might get shot doing it.
So let’s not rush to judge the rush to judge. Let’s be patient!
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Remember how boring you thought Steve Harvey’s book was going to be? Bad example. But most of the time, judging a book by its cover is wrong. Every few months, white people trot out a new title in a series called Cops Keep Killing People. Each new release has the latest tragic scene on the cover. It sure seems to be the same book recycled over and over, but please don’t form a judgment until you read all five hundred pages. Maybe this time the story will end differently and the cops will be the hero!
First impressions are not always correct
That’s the essence of being profiled: judging someone on first impressions. So again, you are being asked to do better than the cop who pulled you over for the “broken taillight.” Don’t you go around profiling all cops!
Wait for All the Facts to Come In
“Let’s wait for all the facts to come in.”
Why not? There’ll be a months-long investigation, so why not wait for all the facts to come in? Then, once you have all the facts, you can see if you think there was a good reason for the cops to have shot you.
The investigation might include an internal report, investigated by other officers. These internal investigations vary from place to place, but the systems are often like those in Ferguson, where the Department of Justice found that “[p]olice supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct.”
Or they might be like the Cleveland Police Department, where investigators told the Justice Department “that they intentionally cast an officer in the best light possible when investigating the officer’s use of deadly force.”
Or it might include a grand jury. Under pressure, prosecutors have started empaneling more special grand juries to investigate police-related deaths. Of course, these grand juries hardly ever indict police officers. Maybe they are still waiting for the facts to come in.
A Jury of Your Peers
If you’re really lucky, there will be a jury trial like in the 2015 Walter Scott case in South Carolina. He ran away, and an officer shot him in the back. That’s not an opinion. There was a tape of the officer shooting him as Walter Scott ran away, and throwing his Taser down near the body to implicate the victim. And then the cop falsified the police report. All that was fully investigated and murder charges were brought. See, the system works!
Of course, that first jury still didn’t convict him. Because it’s gotta be hard to find twelve white people in South Carolina who don’t hate black people. Sorry, my mistake—it wasn’t an all-white jury: there was one black dude. Still, it’s gotta be hard. After the state trial, it took the feds to step in before justice was served, and in December 2017 the officer was sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.
If You’re Lucky, a White Person Will Get Shot
The bottom line is, too few white people have seen a black person killed by the police where they didn’t feel in some way they deserved it. There’s a presumption of innocence that’s given to police that’s almost unexplainable. It doesn’t matter what you see or what you hear: all the cop has to do is say, “I was afraid.”
But sometimes, if you’re lucky, the police fuck up and kill a white person. As I write this, just yesterday, the Minneapolis police killed a white woman. Worse, she was someone’s fiancée. Even worse still, she was blond. And as if that weren’t bad enough, she was Australian—we all know how lovable Australians are. That Crocodile Dundee guy was hilarious. The only way Chris Hemsworth could be cuter is if he was a koala bear.
If they’re killing white, blond-haired Australian women, we don’t have a chance. What if Nicole Kidman is next?
Or maybe we do have a chance. Usually it takes just such a killing to get people focused on why the police are so trigger-happy. It’s one thing if a black dude gets shot, quite another if the cops are shooting blond ladies from Down Under. Oh, did I mention she was a yoga instructor? That’s just about the least shootable white person you could imagine.
If the police are that out of control, who’s next? Quilters? Elementary school librarians? Optometrists?
Immediately after this one shooting, the Minneapolis police chief resigned and an investigation was started. Maybe a tragic killing that white people can relate to will get them to be serious about reforming the police. But let’s not rush to judgment on that!
Summary
If you do get shot, don’t rush to judgment! If you’re black, there’s probably a very good reason for why you got shot.
Don’t you rush to judge the one who rushed to judge you.
Be patient; don’t judge a book by its racist, oppressive cover.
Any police shooting is bound to be investigated, so wait for all the facts to be known and dismissed.
In the end, it might be that white people think you deserved to be shot. But if you’re lucky, the police will start shooting even the most lovable white people and we’ll finally get some reforms!
Stuff White People Say
Well-Meaning White Guy #2: “But, D.L.: Police departments are trying to reform. Look at how they’ve started using body cameras in lots of departments. That’s good, right?”
Vladimir Gjorgiev/Shutterstock
Here’s the thing—if there’s a police shooting, the authorities never let the public see the video until they’ve had a chance to review it. Which is weird to me, because it’s our video. It’s the public’s video, right? Those are our tax dollars at work.
There’s always a long delay before the police release the video, if they ever do. If the purpose of the body cam is to create transparency, then they should want to show the footage immediately. Right then. But they don’t. What they want to do is to see it, make a story up, and then show it.
That’s not transparency. They should get the tape, press play, and the police see it when we see it. That would be transparency. It’s the public’s video equipment.
Instead we get the video, if we do, after the police have looked at it, edited it, made sure the story works. In Baltimore, the police didn’t even figure out how to do the editing right: they submitted videos showing them planting evidence. You don’t put the outtakes in the movie. That’s some shitty filmmaking. Are we shooting Police Academy 8: Body Cams? The police defense is that they were just re-creating finding drugs that they didn’t get on camera. You know, take two.
So that’s what we’ve got now: police who can plant evidence, cover it up, and then claim it was a reenactment. We didn’t buy it so cops could make home movies.
“Oh, the lighting wasn’t right. Do it again.” It’s not a fucking selfie!
“Oh, my eyes were closed.” It’s not for their YouTube channel.
“Let’s do one where I bust down the door from a low-angle and then we dolly in to a tight close-up.” We ain’t making America’s Saddest Home Videos here. Baltimore PD: The Wire was canceled.
A reenactment. Hard to believe that this is the department that killed Freddie Gray while in police custody. Their care in capturing necessary shots for their cinematic opus seems at odds with their lack of care in letting Gray bounce around in their van until he died of a spinal cord injury. Maybe the police forgot to tell us that the van was out scouting locations for their next big feature.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police shot and killed a woman and then seem to have edited the body camera footage before uploading it. A former police department records keeper says that this fits a pattern of cover-ups on video footage by the police there. In a lawsuit filed over the shooting death of Mary Hawkes, her family alleges that video footage from the police officer who shot her
is missing (due to a faulty cable, according to the officer who shot her) or incomplete due to editing after the fact.
So maybe we can’t trust the police to provide the transparency on this. It could be that police officers are like eager little film majors, Spielberg wannabes, or maybe just D. W. Griffith. Or maybe it turns out that body cameras are another tool for the same old story we keep seeing—cops shooting people without cause. These body-cam videos are the worst kind of unwanted sequel.
Police Department Operations Memorandum
Subject: Body Camera Usage Guide
The police department has issued body cameras to all officers. In an effort to increase accountability and help with the training of our officers, the department has issued the following guidelines for body camera use:
1. With limited exceptions, officers are required to activate their body cams when responding to ALL calls. Limited exceptions include: When you forget
When something weird is about to go down
When you might record something incriminating
2. Officers are required to obtain consent prior to recording interviews with crime victims. Except if they are trying to be “tricky” or if the crime victim is probably lying.
3. Officers may turn off cameras during conversations with witnesses who do not want to be on camera. Also, if they need to threaten or belittle.
4. Officers must provide a written statement explaining their decision to not record. Just make something up.
5. The department has policies to prevent data tampering, deleting, or copying. But don’t worry, we’ll only release footage if people get really pissed.
How Not to Get Shot Page 5