Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  Even before the cop pulled me over I had planned on taking care of the tickets soon. A couple of months earlier I made a deal to open a car wash in Michigan City, Indiana, as soon as the weather warmed up in March. Before making the deal, I did a test run. I did more than wash cars. My shop did full-car detailing, both inside and out. I worked twelve hours or more a day, but that was all right with me. Owning my own business and being my own boss had been my dream all my life.

  Most of the paperwork was signed, and I had only a few details left to take care of before I opened up the shop for good the next month. The last thing I was going to do was let some unpaid speeding tickets keep me from driving forty minutes each day between Benton Harbor and Michigan City to run my business. I definitely planned to take care of them in time to open my car wash.

  After the cop let me leave, I drove over to my grandma’s house where I was staying and decided to just chill for the rest of the day. Some of my cousins were there, along with some of their friends, most of whom I didn’t know. There is always a crowd at my grandma’s house. I’ve got a ton of cousins, and some of them were always around. That wasn’t a big deal for me.

  I hooked up my PlayStation 2 and started playing some games. One of my cousins came in and played a couple of games with me. He told me he really liked my game system. “Why don’t you sell it to me?” he asked.

  I told him, “No man, I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred bucks right now,” he said.

  “All right, sold.” I needed the cash to pay off my tickets. Between that and the money I had from a check I’d just cashed from another job, I had about all I needed to pay them off.

  After I sold the game to my cousin, we kept on playing. This was pretty much all I had planned for the day until one of my brothers, Buck, called to tell me he’d just talked to my ex.

  I’d had a long-term girlfriend, but we had broken up over a year before.

  “Yeah, what did she say?” I asked.

  “She wants to bring your baby boy over to see you today, this afternoon,” Buck said.

  “Wow, man, finally,” I said, excited. My ex and I had dated and then lived together for quite a while. However, things between us started falling apart when we found out she was pregnant. I started working extra-long hours so I could take care of my new family. At the time I worked a couple of different jobs. This was before the opportunity for the car wash came up. She didn’t like my working so much and eventually everything just fell apart. She took off and I had not seen her since. I didn’t even know she’d had the baby until long afterward. This was going to be my first time to see my son.

  “Yeah, I know it,” Buck said. “So she’s going to bring him over to see you, and I don’t know, she might leave him with you for the day or maybe a couple of days.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be ready.”

  When I hung up the phone, I went to my room and changed my clothes and got ready to meet my son for the first time. I was nervous and excited at the same time. I checked out the kitchen and we didn’t have a lot in there. Since I did not know how long I might have my son, I figured I needed to run to the store to pick up a few things. Going to the store presented a real problem. If I drove to the little neighborhood convenience store that was only a half mile from my grandma’s house and got pulled over, I’d probably be arrested for driving with a suspended license. If that happened, there was no way I’d see my son. If my ex showed up and I wasn’t here, she’d leave and not wait for me. But if my ex brought my son over and the cupboard was bare, I might not see him again for a long time either because she would think I was not able to take care of him.

  I had to go to the store, but I could not drive. Not a problem, I thought. I had some cousins and their friends there in the house and they had cars. “Any of y’all want to give me a ride to the store real fast?” I asked.

  One of the guys in the house, a guy named Will who knew one of my cousins, said, “Yeah. I’m fixing to go. I’ll take you.”

  “All right, cool,” I said. I got up to leave right away, which is what I needed to do, but he kept messing around, doing something, I don’t know what. To be honest, I could have walked to the store and back by the time he was finally ready to go. I didn’t say anything because I was the one asking for a ride.

  Finally, he said, “You ready? Let’s go.” We drove to the store in his silver Dodge Durango. He drove. I rode in the passenger seat. Will had come over from Detroit, and the back of the car was full of his stuff.

  When we pulled up to the store, Will asked me, “Can I borrow your phone?” Actually he asked before we even got to the store.

  “Sure, man,” I said. I figured that was the least I could do since he had given me a ride. He parked the car. I handed Will my phone and went into the store. This was not going to be a long shopping trip. I wanted to get in and out and back to my grandma’s house as quickly as possible. For all I knew my ex was already there with my little boy. Little boy! The thought of that caused a smile to break free on my face. I picked up some milk, chips, pop, and gummy worms and went to pay for them. Gummy worms were my thing back then. Will had better be ready to go as soon as I get out of here, I thought. I didn’t have a minute to spare.

  —

  The outside of the store looked completely different when I walked out with my stuff. The parking spots that had been empty a few minutes earlier were now full of cars. People were walking around. I paused for a moment. A guy walked up to the door, but he didn’t act like he wanted to go into the store. He was coming after me. I know this because I stepped aside a little and he got right in my face. Wow, what’s going on? I thought.

  “Where’s the dope, man?” the guy said.

  “You can’t be talking to me,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m talking to you. Where’s the dope?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have time for this mess. I just started walking back to where Will had parked his Durango at the side of the store.

  The guy blocked my way. “You got something for me?” he said.

  I just shook my head, annoyed.

  Then he reached into his shirt and pulled out a badge that was hanging on a chain around his neck. “You got something for me?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said and kept on walking. That’s when I saw Will standing outside the Durango on the passenger side of the car. Why is he on that side? I wondered.

  Before I could ask Will anything, the guy I now knew was a cop pulled me over to the police car in front of the store. “Hands on the hood,” he said.

  “You serious?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Hands on the hood.”

  I did as I was told, but all I could think was how I didn’t have time for this. Not now. If my ex showed up at my grandma’s house and I wasn’t there, I might never get to see my son. I set my bag of groceries down and leaned against the car hood. The cop patted me down. He reached into my front jeans pocket and pulled out the cash I had from selling my PlayStation and cashing my check. I think I had somewhere around $500 on me. I never saw that money again.

  “He’s clean,” the cop said to another officer standing nearby.

  “Yeah I’m clean. I told you I was clean. Can I get out of here now? I gotta get home,” I said. That wasn’t all I said, but this is a family book. I was starting to get mad. When you’re a black man in Benton Harbor, getting hassled by the police is just a part of life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been pulled over for driving while black or how many times the cops searched me while I was walking down the street, minding my own business. It happens all the time. But this day I didn’t have time for this nonsense. I had to get home.

  “Get in the back of the car,” the cop insisted.

  “What!? You don’t have any reason to arrest me,” I said. “I need to get home.”

  “Get in the car,” he said again. He didn’t cuff me or anything like that, which was a good t
hing. If he had cuffed me I might have lost it. The whole thing was garbage. He had no reason to stop me or search me or hold me in this car. But I got in the back of the car like I was told. I knew what happens to those who don’t.

  After putting me in the car, the cop went over to Will’s Durango. He said something to Will, then turned him around and cuffed him. The cop then brought Will over to the car and put him in the back seat next to me. As soon as the cop was out of earshot I asked Will, “What is going on, man?”

  “Shh, shh…they got cameras on,” Will said.

  “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with none of this stuff. What is the problem? Why am I sitting in the back of this police car with you, man?”

  “Just…Just wait. I gotta…you know…We can get over to the county lockup and we can…uh…bond out.”

  “Bond out?” I said. “I’m not going to county for anything. We need to clear this up now so I can get home.”

  “Yeah, man, we can bond out and then I’m going to run,” Will said like he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  I felt like I was about to explode. “What are you even talking about? What is going on? What did you do?”

  “Shh, man. Don’t say nothing. They got cameras on us.”

  Several cops gathered around the Durango. I knew they were searching it, but that didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t my car. The back of the car was full of Will’s stuff. I’d never been in it before he gave me the ride to the store. The only possible thing they could find in it was my cell phone, which I needed right now in case my brother called me with news about my ex and my baby son.

  A couple of minutes later the cop who put me in the back of the car came walking back over to his police car. He had a stupid smile on his face. In his hand he held a baggie with what looked like some rock inside, that is, crack cocaine. He waved it at me and said, “Gotcha.”

  I shrugged and gave him an “I don’t care” look. So he’d found crack cocaine in Will’s car. That had nothing to do with me. I didn’t know Will. I didn’t know what he was into. He was going to get arrested and might do some real time for something like this, but it had nothing to do with me.

  The cop came closer. “What’s your name?”

  I said nothing.

  “Where do you live?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “You got a Social Security number?”

  Silence.

  “All right. You don’t want to talk. That’s fine with me, but eventually you’ll have to. You’re under arrest for possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute.”

  I could not believe my ears. I looked at Will, who didn’t say a word. He knew this wasn’t my dope and he could have cleared the whole thing up right then and there, but he didn’t say a word. I looked back over at the cop.

  “This is BS,” I said. “I ain’t got nothing to do with that dope you found. That’s not my dope. That’s not even my car.”

  “Yeah, right,” the cop said.

  —

  I did not see my baby son that day. I didn’t get to see him until he was five years old. I also didn’t know who this cop was—not yet. I soon found out his name: Andrew Collins. For the next three years, not a day went by that I didn’t think about my son who I had never seen and the cop who had kept me from him. And for most of those three years, I promised myself that if I ever saw this cop again, I was going to kill him. I intended to keep that promise.

  Andrew

  I woke up on the morning of February 8, 2006, determined to go out and make a big drug bust. As a relatively new narcotics officer, I had the same goal every day. I’d been on the Benton Harbor Police Department for a little over two years, and already I’d made a name for myself as one of the most aggressive narcotics officers on the force. Even when I worked on patrol, I made a lot of drug busts. That’s what got me moved up the food chain. I bragged that I could tell if someone had drugs on them just by looking at them.

  Claiming I could spot a drug dealer on sight wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it sounds since I worked in Benton Harbor. Our department patrolled an area of only four square miles, but within that small area we had more drug houses and drug use than probably anywhere in America. On some of the streets I patrolled, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a drug house or someone with drugs in their pockets. Early on I learned the jump-out method of flushing drug users or dealers. Anytime I saw a group of individuals congregating in one area, I stopped my patrol car, jumped out, and quickly walked over to the group. If anyone ran, I assumed they had drugs on them. In my first year on the force, I was involved in over one hundred foot chases and lost only five.

  The only problem with the jump out was that when someone ran, they dropped whatever drugs they might have had on them. By the time I caught up with them, they were clean. I still arrested them for resisting an officer, but I was frustrated I couldn’t pin anything bigger on them when I knew for a fact they were guilty. After all, if they weren’t guilty, why did they run? I learned to retrace my steps and find whatever drugs the fleeing suspect had thrown down. Unfortunately, finding a bag of crack in the bushes does not constitute proof that the guy I was chasing had thrown it. And if I couldn’t connect them directly to the drugs on the ground, the drug charges disappeared and I was back to having nothing more on them than resisting an officer.

  I learned my way around this minor technicality when a prosecutor asked me, “Are you sure you didn’t see him throw the drugs down while you were chasing him?” The way the prosecutor framed the question told me the answer he wanted to hear. “Oh yeah,” I’d say, “I did see him throw something in that bush and I can confidently say that something was a bag of crack.” Yes, that was lying under oath, but I really felt I had no choice because of the system. When I knew a suspect was guilty, I wasn’t about to let him get off on a technicality. No good cop would; at least that’s how I justified my actions to myself.

  I never really thought about how my actions might impact the relationship between the police department and the people of Benton Harbor. Long before I arrived, those relations were already strained. In fact, the day I was supposed to join the department in June 2003 was pushed back after a high-speed police chase in town ended tragically. White police officers tried to pull over a black man on a motorcycle because his license plate was expired. The man took off and the officers chased him. The chase reached speeds of more than one hundred miles per hour before the motorcyclist crashed into a house and died. Benton Harbor erupted into violence, not so much because of the man’s death, but because it was the latest in a long line of such actions by the overwhelmingly white police department in a town that is 95 percent black.

  And that wasn’t the first time the city had broken down into violence over tension with the police. The first race riots took place back in the 1960s when George Romney was the governor. He sent in the National Guard to restore order.

  Honestly, nothing had really changed from the sixties until the time I joined the department. I had even been warned when I was a student at the police academy not to take a job in Benton Harbor. I tried to find a job elsewhere. I sent out eighty résumés when I graduated. Only two places replied. Benton Harbor was the first to offer me a job, so I took it. I was willing to go anywhere to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a police officer.

  When I was five or six, my dad, who was really my stepdad, started hitting my mom. The police arrived and made everything right. The officer who came that night took my mom and me and my little brother to a safe place. He let me ride in the front seat of the patrol car and even use his siren.

  After that I never wanted to be anything except a cop. Now that I was one, I was good at it. I made a lot of arrests and I put a lot of bad people behind bars. Every day when I woke up I was determined to put a few more away. That was especially true on February 8, 2006.

  —

  When I started my patrol that morning, I headed off to one of the streets where I knew drug activity occurred. On th
e outside it didn’t look like a drug hot spot. Benton Harbor looks like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, with houses built around the turn of the century. Tall, mature trees line every block. Looks are deceiving. The drug trade took over the city long before I got there. The town is poor, city services are meager, and the unemployment rate was at least 25 percent when I moved there. Just across the St. Joseph River, it is a different story completely. The town of St. Joseph butts up against Benton Harbor. It is a resort town on the banks of Lake Michigan. Tourists flock to its Main Street with quaint shops and restaurants. Back then tourists rarely drove across the bridge to Benton Harbor. St. Joseph is also over 90 percent white with a median family income three times that of Benton Harbor.

  I hadn’t been on patrol long when I spotted what I was looking for. Up ahead was a solitary man on a street known to be a drug hot spot. I stopped my car, got out, and headed toward him. He didn’t run. Maybe it was too cold for that kind of thing or maybe he just recognized me because the two of us had had several encounters in the past. I searched him and found a quarter ounce of crack in one of his pockets. A quarter ounce is about equal to a handful of M&M’s, not by weight but in size.

  “What are you doing with these drugs?” I asked.

  “Well, uh, you know,” he said.

  “Get in the car,” I said. I didn’t want to spend any more time out in the open talking to my suspect than I had to in case someone happened to see us. Confidential informants don’t stay confidential when people in town see them talking to cops.

  My suspect climbed into the back of the car.