by Matt Taibbi
By the mid-2000s, they were married, and it wasn’t long before Andrew accelerated what he would later call his “transformation.” He worked to become less angry, stay focused on the good things in life. There was a milestone when Shanette had their first child, a son they named Andrew Jr., or A.J. He remembers the pride he felt signing his name on A.J.’s birth certificate.
They had two more kids, Amir and Amare (the “three A’s,” he jokes), plus Shanette already had a daughter of her own. The six of them moved together into a little three-room apartment at 921 Myrtle Avenue, which was just three blocks from his first home on Willoughby, but there was that long journey in between.
He started to go to classes to get his CDL, a commercial driver’s license, with the idea that he would get a job driving a bus. Shanette, she was going to work for the housing authority. Everything was trending in the right direction—except for one thing.
He was out of the life, but the police never got the memo. If anything, he was getting stopped by the police even more.
The random nature of his situation started to sink in. In crime, out of crime, it didn’t matter. What was constant was that the police had a buffet of options they could use to arrest any young man on the street in his neighborhood, and they used all those options, seemingly without regard to whether there was any cause to or not.
Like they could pick you up, arrest you, at any time, for “disorderly conduct,” which could mean just about anything. Their crime-fighting methods could best be described as accidental. They mostly just swept up every fish in the pond and threw back the ones they couldn’t stick with a charge.
The crazy thing was, anyone could be police. Black, white, Hispanic, in uniform, out of uniform, marked cars, unmarked. That old cliché about cops you could spot a mile away in “unmarked” blue Plymouths didn’t work in twenty-first-century Brooklyn, where the police could be driving anything: Lexuses, tricked-out SUVs, sports cars, beaters, the whole gamut. There was a special “crime squad” with a mandate to get guns by any means necessary that had a rep for driving really nice cars, and their officers were known for wearing sharp clothes. You could just be walking down the street and someone could grab you, which happened to Andrew more than once.
After the macing incident, Andrew had seen a lawyer who specialized in police abuse cases. He learned about what was legal and illegal, what his rights were, and how to file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent review group with subpoena power that had been created in 1950 to investigate police misconduct. The CCRB’s power had grown slightly over the years after incidents like the Tompkins Square Park beatings in 1988 and the Abner Louima incident—that was the one where police sodomized a Haitian man with a plunger after he was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub in 1997—and there was at least a place to go to complain if you got beaten up or harassed.
Andrew didn’t blame the police for the way his early life had turned out. He knew he had to answer to himself for most of the wrongs of his past, especially the last year of his mother’s life. There were plenty of other negative influences as well. But as he increasingly began to realize, the police were a definite negative presence in this landscape. Even as a little kid, even when his mother was still alive, he’d been roughed up by police, and he vividly remembered police threatening to arrest his mother for negligence when she tried to intervene in one of his arrests. For most of his life, he hadn’t really thought about the police one way or another—they were just there, like the weather, a thing to be dealt with: he and his friends were on one side, and they were on the other side. But now that he was trying to get out of crime, he wanted to get away from them, too, so he tried to learn how to do it, what the rules were.
One day he was on his way home from his commercial driver’s license class, walking less than fifty yards from his apartment entrance, when someone just grabbed him from behind. “What is it? I didn’t do anything!” he shouted, and before he knew it, two plainclothes detectives, one on each side of him, were pushing him up against some scaffolding.
One of the police was a huge black guy; he doesn’t remember the other so well, but what he does remember is that they both used handcuffs on him, so that he eventually had two sets of handcuffs digging into his wrists.
“What’d I do?” Andrew asked.
“You fit the description,” one of the police answered.
Andrew knew it was pointless to ask what description. “Everybody in my neighborhood fits the description,” Andrew explains.
The big black officer then flipped Andrew around and threw him onto the ground, pushing his face into the wet sidewalk—it was a wet night, too—before driving his knee into Andrew’s back.
Next thing he knew, he was again being loaded into a van, taken for another ride, and this time they stopped at a nearby fire station, where there was an even bigger van waiting, this one half full of more cuffed people. At the fire station, the police asked Andrew: Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to the precinct?
Here again you get into the weird nature of this new policing system. The police in this case actually wanted to send Andrew home. Their strategy is to roust up everybody, search them for guns or drugs, run their names for warrants. If you get a hit, great. Finding guns, making arrests, and writing summonses is what turns line patrolmen into sergeants and lieutenants. But if you don’t find anything, well then, you’ve just brutalized some guy walking home, for no reason at all, and the last thing you want is a paper trail. So better just to let the guy go, hope the situation goes away.
But Andrew had been through the CCRB process. He didn’t want it to just go away.
“No way. You’re not going to throw me on the ground like that and then just let me go,” he said. “You might as well take me to the station now.”
So they took him to the station, processed him, strip-searched him, then gave him a summons for disorderly conduct. New York Penal Law 240.20, subsection 5: “Obstructing pedestrian traffic.”
In other words, he was arrested for standing on the sidewalk.
Andrew knew all about the disorderly conduct statute. It reads: “A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when …”
Then there’s a whole list of stuff you can’t do, like make noise, make an obscene gesture, refuse a lawful order to disperse, or “obstruct vehicular or pedestrian traffic.”
“Last time I read that law,” one public defender would joke to me later, “I thought to myself, ‘Shit, I violated that one five times just today.’ ”
The obstructing traffic section is meant to apply to people who are willfully blocking cars or people on the sidewalk, or to be used as a tool for crowd control at things like protests, but in practice it’s code for being black on a Tuesday night.
Andrew had actually taken that charge before, around the corner from the “fit the description” incident, on Throop Avenue. He had been standing with a group of people alongside a building when the police rolled up in numbers and gave about a dozen people tickets for disorderly conduct. Andrew got littering on top of disorderly conduct, for flicking a cigarette butt onto the street from the sidewalk. What Andrew thought he had learned from that incident was that the police don’t like it when you stand up against a building.
So the next time he came that way, he was taking a stroll with his dog Roxy, smoking a cigarette, and ran into a couple of friends. This time he made it a point to move away from the building. He leaned over and told his friend: “Let’s move to the corner.”
So they moved to the corner. Next thing he knew, two vans tore down the street and slammed their brakes at the corner of Throop and Myrtle. Police jumped out.
“You’ve gotta move off the corner!” they shouted.
Andrew frowned. “Y’all just got finished telling me last time to stay away from the building,” he said. “So now I’m off the building, and you say I can’t be here? I’m walking my dog.”
The police didn’t answer. They took him
to a station, strip-searched him—there’s almost always a strip search—processed him, then sent him on his way with another summons: disorderly conduct, obstructing pedestrian traffic.
Not long after, he went to the grocery store on Throop Avenue, just around the corner from his Myrtle Avenue place. About ten yards from the store, he saw that the store door was closed and there were two uniformed cops inside, talking to the owner. Not only was the store closed, but there were police inside it: Andrew turned around. He made it as far as a fire hydrant on the corner of Throop and Myrtle before the two cops caught up to him. “Hey, you,” one shouted. “Stop.”
Andrew kept walking.
“Hey,” said one of the two police, and he took Andrew’s arm.
Andrew, not in the right mood for this, tried to pull away. Next thing he knew, his face was up against an iron grate, and the two police were pushing his arm up to the point where it felt like it was going to break. Andrew yelled out: “What is it this time?”
“You fit the description!”
They kept slamming him against the grate; he could feel his shoulder joint giving. Freaking out, he calmed down just enough to try some logic with the two officers.
“Hey, hey, listen!” he shouted. “If I fit the description, let me hear it over the walkie-talkie. If I really do fit the description, we’ll talk, okay?”
The cops didn’t go for the idea. Instead, they dragged him to a squad car. Andrew, struggling, didn’t want to get into the car. One of the two police threw open the door; the other went around the car, opened the back door on the other side, and jumped into the backseat, getting ready to drag Andrew in from the other side.
The absurd tag-team operation in place, the first officer pushed Andrew’s head against the roof of the car, knocking his brand-new black leather Yankee cap to the ground. Hey, that cost me fifty dollars, Andrew thought. Next thing he knew, he felt himself being pulled into the back of the car by his legs, sideways. He was looking at his cap on the ground as the squad car door slammed shut.
The usual routine: a trip to the precinct, a strip search, and a summons for disorderly conduct. It would later come out that the “description” was of a black male in an eight-ball jacket, carrying five guns. Andrew was dressed in all black and the Yankee hat. When asked later in a deposition how Andrew fit the description, the arresting officer couldn’t say.
More time passes. It’s November 2012. Andrew has a real job now, wears a tie to work. He’s thirty-five years old. He drives a shuttle bus for the new Resorts casino near the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, ferrying people to and from the subway station.
It’s a good job. He doesn’t make a ton of money, but he pays the bills, takes care of his kids. He leaves every afternoon in a black tie and white-collared shirt, comes home after midnight most every weeknight. He sleeps until seven or eight in the morning, then helps Shanette get her eleven-year-old daughter and little A.J., now three, ready for school. Amir and Amare are too young for school yet and spend the day ping-ponging around the apartment while Andrew wishes he could be catching up on his sleep.
The family has a big L-shaped couch upholstered with water-damaged black leather, a wide-screen TV, a video-game console, their Rottweiler mix Roxy, who’s friendly most of the time, and a few pieces of furniture. The only thing hanging on the apartment’s faintly discolored walls is a framed series of studio-made photographs of Andrew with his arms around Shanette back when she was pregnant with their first baby, her bare belly exposed to the camera, Andrew smiling, his forearm wrapped around her, his hand resting on her navel.
His usual schedule is he gets off from work around 11:30, and his father comes to pick him up at the company’s bus depot, then drives him back to Myrtle. That’s what happened on November 14, a Wednesday night. His father dropped Andrew off right at 921 Myrtle, directly in front of his building. Andrew climbed out of the car, still dressed in his black tie and collared shirt, a plastic work ID hanging around his neck, obviously a working man coming home after a long day, his fullback’s build and short mini-dreads the only hints of his tough past still visible.
He got out of the car, spotted a friend from his building, and together they decided to walk across the street to an all-night store to get something to eat. On the way there, Andrew pulled out his phone and handed his friend some headphones, so he could listen to a song Andrew had written for Shanette:
I been sitting here thinkin what the hell is going on
I been sitting here thinkin ’bout the things that I done wrong
And I just wanna be in your life in your life forever
Can we just leave, leave the past, leave the past, move on
Andrew and his friend walked back across the street and stopped in front of their building to listen to the end of the song. While they were listening, Andrew spotted two uniformed police coming around from behind the building. He didn’t want to go back into the building, didn’t want to run, didn’t want to make any false moves at all. They were housing police, and he knew they were looking for tickets to write. He braced himself for the situation.
One of the two officers walked around Andrew and his friend and stood between them and the doorway of 921 Myrtle. This was their own building, remember, where they actually lived. The policeman said:
“You’re blocking pedestrian traffic.”
It was nearly one in the morning. There was nobody on the street, let alone the walkway outside a project apartment building.
Andrew sagged his shoulders.
“Come on, man,” he said. “Look at me. I’m in a tie. I got my work ID around my neck. I’m coming home from work. Are you serious?”
The police demanded to see IDs. Andrew refused, knowing that once he did, they would just write him another summons for blocking pedestrian traffic. Before long, there were police all over him, and there was that mysterious van again, screeching into the parking lot in front of his house. They cuffed him, pushed him toward the vehicle, and Andrew got prepared for yet another night in a precinct, another strip search.
Just before they put him in the van, a sergeant finally did appear.
“It’s too late,” Andrew said. “If you’d just talked to me first, we could have done this differently. But you got aggressive with me, cuffed me, put me in the van already. Now that it’s gone this far, you might as well take me in.”
The sergeant complied. They took him away in the van. Another strip search, another summons. Under “offense,” it reads: “Obstructing pedestrian traffic.”
He made it home in the middle of the morning, got a little sleep, and went off to work again the next day.
I met Andrew by chance in a lawyer’s office months later. He had the summons in his pocket, all crumpled up. I unfurled the paper, squinted at it. Sure enough, it read, “Obstructing pedestrian traffic.” Like most white people, I had no idea you could be arrested for such a thing.
As with a lot of the young New Yorkers I’d talked to about this subject, the number-one emotion that came through when Andrew told me this whole story was exhaustion.
“The thing is, you get a twenty-two-, twenty-three-year-old police stopping you, and you’re thirty-five, forty years old, and he still talks to you like you’re a child,” he says.
February 21, 2013. Andrew has to appear in court to answer his summons for obstructing pedestrian traffic. He’s actually got two summonses, one for standing in front of his building, the other for smoking indoors. In the latter case, he was standing outside, smoking, when his son A.J. ran into a convenience store. Andrew chased him inside, and a policeman spotted him and wrote him up.
Andrew had originally pleaded not guilty to the smoking violation—though he was technically smoking indoors, it was only briefly, and he felt the policeman was just jumping on a chance to dump a ticket on him—but now that he was actually in court, he was ready to just plead that one out. He had, after all, been smoking indoors. On the other one, however, the summons for standing in front of his
own home, he wasn’t pleading, no matter what they offered him. He was actually hoping that the officer who’d stopped him would show up in court, because he was genuinely curious to hear how he’d defend the summons.
The building at 346 Broadway in Lower Manhattan is, I imagine, the grimmest kind of courthouse you can find anywhere in New York State. It’s a filthy, half-crumbling building full of beat-up, yellowed hearing rooms packed with rows of skewed pine benches covered with everything from cigarette wrappers to Oreo crumbs. Andrew’s case was in a urine-colored hall called Part 3, a miserable place manned by about a half-dozen impatient-to-the-bone civil servants, including two grumpy bailiffs who spent all their time barking at people for using cell phones or talking, a couple of mute court clerks, half shielded by a partition, who never looked up from their desks, and two very elderly and barely lucid old white men who were the court-appointed defenders taking turns defending the virtually all-black crowd of summons defendants.
Lastly there was His Honor, a Judge John J. Delury, a white-haired old fellow who seemed terminally exhausted and concerned almost entirely with getting the case in front of him over with and moving on to the next one, and on to the next one from there, and then on and on as fast as possible, probably to the end of his life, another thing I imagined he maybe wanted to get over with as soon as he could—who knew?
Andrew waited for his case to be called. The action was monotonous and depressing. A court clerk would call out a name and an offense (“Jamel Williams, open container of alcohol”), and inevitably a black male somewhere between the ages of puberty and infirmity, probably dressed in a ski parka and low-hung jeans, would amble to the front of the court. There he would be greeted by one of the two court-appointed attorneys.