by Rosa Brooks
My mention of the morgue generated a brief flicker of interest, but it was quickly replaced by another eye roll.
“So do me a favor, Kenisha,” I concluded. “Listen to your mom. I know how she’s feeling. I’ve got two kids too. I’ve got a teenage daughter. I worry about her too. That’s what moms do. So I know it’s annoying when your mom says don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t go here, don’t go there. But she’s your mom, and it’s her job to worry about you. Okay? So can you try to mind her, make sure she knows where you are, listen to her when she says to stay home? She’s not saying it just to be annoying, even though I know it can feel that way to you. She wants you to go to school, study, stay out of trouble, grow up, live a good, safe life. She loves you.”
Kenisha inspected her fingernails. “Whatever.”
* * *
• • •
We got a lot of calls involving conflicts between mothers and daughters. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me.
On my next shift, we got a call for a family disturbance, and when we arrived, we could hear a woman shouting, “Out! I want you out!” Objects were flying down the stairs from the townhouse’s second level: a pair of jeans, a book, a shoe.
The man who opened the door shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything. It’s unfortunate, his body language suggested, but what can you do?
Behind him, in the living room, a girl was huddled on the sofa, crying.
“Out! Gone! Git!” The voice was coming from the top of the stairs.
A backpack flew down at us.
“Whoa! Police!” My partner headed toward the stairs, and I headed toward the girl, both of us shouting and dodging flying objects.
“Please stop throwing things!”
A woman’s head and torso appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Officers, you need to take her away.” The woman pointed at the sobbing girl on the sofa. “She is out of control!”
“Ma’am, could you please come down and tell us what’s going on?”
As in most family disturbance calls, the story was garbled because people kept interrupting one another, and no one would stay still.
The woman at the top of the stairs refused to descend, but the rain of objects from the upstairs landing stopped.
“She try to bite me,” she called down. “The little bitch try to bite me. You need to get her out of here.”
I looked at the “little bitch.” She was little, maybe fifteen or sixteen.
“You try to bite her, like she says?” my partner asked.
She wiped her cheeks. “Nah.” She looked both defiant and resigned. “I just pretended to try to bite her.”
I went over to the girl and gestured with my head to my partner. He nodded and headed up the stairs. The man who had answered the door busied himself making coffee, carefully keeping his back to us.
“So what happened here?” I asked the girl.
She looked down. “Me and my mother got into it.”
“Okay . . .”
“That her new boyfriend.” She gestured at the man making coffee. “They got a baby.”
She sniffled, starting to choke up again. “She want him around, she want the baby around, she want my sister around. The only person she don’t want around is me.”
Upstairs, I heard raised voices again, and an entire twin-size mattress came sliding down the stairs.
“Here’s your bed! Take it and go!”
The girl collapsed into tears. “She want everybody around except me.”
* * *
• • •
All over Washington, it sometimes seemed, there were girls whose mothers wanted them arrested, and girls whose mothers wanted nothing to do with them.
I thought of my own mother, whose disapproval still rankled. But I was lucky, so undeservedly lucky: even during those painful years before I left for college, when our house felt like a prison, each of us trapped in separate, solitary cells, I never doubted my mother’s love for me. The prison bars I chafed against as a teenager were constructed from my own emotions, not from cold, hard metal.
On another evening in the spring of 2017, I was patrolling with an officer called Reid, a self-declared Second Amendment nut. (“I’m a single issue voter,” he informed me. “And my issue is gun rights.”) Reid collected weapons, and in his spare time, he took every commercially available course on defensive tactics, room clearing, and active-shooter situations. He never allowed his two young sons to enter a store or restaurant without first determining all exit locations and looking through the windows to determine the position and threat posture of all occupants, he told me earnestly: “I want tactical room entry to be second nature to them.”
To his credit, Reid took his role as my ad hoc training officer seriously. He spent an hour drilling me on safe traffic stop tactics and another hour showing me the websites of training schools where I could further my tactical education. He was delighted to have a law professor as his partner, and spent another hour offering an explication of the drafting history of the Second Amendment, an exercise that only ended when we were called to an assault in progress.
Lights flashing and sirens blaring, I drove to the scene Code 1, under Reid’s watchful eye. When we arrived a minute or two later, we were greeted at the apartment’s outer door by a tearful woman in a black T-shirt.
“I need you to take my daughter before I kill her. I’m serious, she’s breaking up my shit, swinging on me . . .”
She sat down on the stairwell, put her head in her hands, and started crying.
“She mad, she keep asking my boyfriend for money, calling me, ‘Fuck you, bitch!’” She shook her head. “I’m like, ‘Get the hell out of my house, now!’”
Reid told me to interview her while he went to the apartment to talk to the daughter. “It’s unlocked,” the mother called after him. “Just go in.”
I stayed out on the landing, trying to get the details: Who, what, why, when, where, how?
She gave me the basics, but mostly just sat there crying, holding her head, defeat plain on her face.
“I can’t even think. She slamming my lamps, breaking my lamps, biting me, breaking up shit in my house, breaking my fan.”
She took a gulp of air and looked up at me. “She need to learn. I want her to go to jail. I want her to be in some type of home. I don’t even have custody of her; my mother did. My mother keeps sending her over here.”
“So, she’s seventeen, she lives with her grandmother, your mother, but your mother keeps sending her back here? Why’s that?”
She shrugged, indifferent, or exhausted. “They be going through whatever. So my mom keeps sending her over to my house. She is fucking disrespectful. She try to pull my hair out. Look at this shit!”
She examined a livid bruise on her arm, but she seemed more sad than outraged, and she declined the offer to have a medic check her out.
“She wanted money from my boyfriend, I’m telling her to wait, he going to get her some money, but she calling me all types of bitches, ‘fuck you,’ all that.”
“I’m going to go inside, check in with my partner, okay?” I gestured to her apartment door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Inside the apartment, I found I had interrupted a tense scene. A slender girl sat slumped on a folding chair in the middle of the room, and Reid was speaking to her sternly.
“I can’t see what you’re doing and you might try to hurt me; that’s why I raised my voice.”
The girl looked offended. “I’m not trying to hurt you!”
“I don’t know that,” Reid retorted. “I never met you before and I don’t know that. You could be trying to hurt me.”
“But if I’m trying to hurt you, sir, you got a gun!”
“Plenty of people with guns have been killed,” Reid infor
med her. “Plenty of police officers. All I’m trying to explain to you is, in the future, if something like that happens, now you understand why we react like that.”
What had happened? I stood at the door, looking from Reid to the girl and back again.
“I was looking for my phone out of my bag when you came in the door,” the girl protested.
Reid was unmoved. “Am I a mind reader? I didn’t know what you were looking for.”
“Well you didn’t have to grab me out,” the girl said indignantly. “I know how to cooperate. I would’ve just sat down!”
“But you didn’t. So I told you to put your hands out, and show me where they were.”
“I did that already, sir!”
Reid evidently decided that his explication of sound officer safety tactics was falling on deaf ears, so he changed the subject. “Okay, please tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened.”
The girl was having none of it. “I don’t want to tell you. I want to talk to another officer,” she said sulkily.
Good for you, kid, I thought.
“Okay then,” Reid said brightly. “Would you like to speak to Officer Brooks?”
“Yes.”
Reid looked at me and pointed at the girl. “She’s seventeen years old, name is Imani, the boyfriend and a baby are in the back room.”
“Got it.”
Reid retreated to the stairwell.
“How you doing, Imani? Sounds like you had a bad morning,” I offered.
Imani sat quiet in a chair, wiping her eyes with the hem of her shirt. The room was a wreck, almost entirely empty of furniture, just a few folding chairs, with clothes all over the floor. The walls were bare—no decorations, nothing.
Imani’s story matched her mother’s, more or less. She and her mother had started to argue, and somehow things got out of hand.
“It started getting wild, she yanking my hair, and I did start swinging back,” she acknowledged. “Then I just wanted to leave. I started looking for my phone, I’m looking for my school uniforms, I gotta go to school on Monday. But she screaming at me and she keep on yanking at my hair, it hurts all over my head. I’m the one who called the police.”
It was shortly after this, apparently, that Reid came in, and spotted Imani reaching into a bag. She was searching for her phone again, she told me, so she could show Reid that she was the one who had called 911. But Reid, seeing her suddenly reach into her bag, assumed the worst.
“He just grab me, he put me in the chair, he just jumped at me!”
I thought Reid had acted like an ass. By now, after more than six months of patrolling, I was starting to trust my own instincts. Yes, people reaching into bags sometimes pulled out weapons, but the people who pulled out guns and shot at cops were virtually never young girls in their mothers’ living rooms. Letting the girl reach into her bag would have involved a level of risk that was statistically insignificant, and the alternative was to further spook an already traumatized girl, as Reid had done. This girl had a rough-enough life to start with. She didn’t need a jumpy cop screaming at her for reaching into her own backpack.
But I couldn’t say any of this to Imani. Instead I said, in an apologetic tone, “Yeah, cops can get nervous. You go to an apartment and you don’t know who’s there, you kind of want everybody sitting still . . . he probably just got a little nervous.”
Imani was back to worrying over the fight with her mother.
“I wasn’t raised by her; it’s like I don’t know her, and she don’t even want to know me.” For a moment, she looked lost and sad. “She and her boyfriend, she and Grandma, they always fighting about something.”
“What kinds of things?” I asked.
“Stupid stuff, they’re always taking it out on me.” She looked at me, plaintive. “I just want to go.”
She did go too, but not in the way I’d have liked. While I was talking to Imani, Reid summoned the sergeant, and somewhere along the line, while Imani and I sat there making small talk about her favorite school subjects and the things she liked to do on weekends, Reid and the sergeant decided that Imani was the primary aggressor in what had now been redefined as a domestic violence assault situation, triggering a mandatory arrest. Imani was heading to the juvenile processing center, and since it sounded like her grandmother was unable or unwilling to keep her, odds were high that Imani’s mother would get her wish, and the girl would end up in a court-ordered group placement.
It fell to me, as the only female officer present, to cuff Imani and pat her down. She didn’t complain or struggle. In her short life, I suppose, she’d already gotten used to things turning out badly. But it was one of my worst moments as a police officer. This girl was a victim, not a criminal. I thought of my own children, and imagined how my daughter would feel if both I and her grandmother seemed to be rejecting her. Would she want to lash out at me or hit me? If she did, I wouldn’t blame her. Adults are supposed to take care of children. Instead, I was attaching heavy metal handcuffs to Imani’s thin wrists. I felt a little sick.
* * *
• • •
A few months later, with a different partner, I responded to another assault-in-progress call. The MDT described it as involving “serious bleeding.”
It was dark when we arrived, and the address the dispatcher gave us turned out to be wrong, so for a while we wandered around in the housing project’s parking lot, looking for signs of a bloody assault. After a few minutes a young girl came tentatively up to us, accompanied by a small boy in a Redskins football jersey.
“We the ones who called,” she confided. “’Bout our mom.”
“It’s your mom who’s hurt?” I clarified.
“Mmm-hmm.” She looked down at her toes. She was no older than twelve or thirteen, and the boy with her looked to be nine or ten.
“What happened?”
“Um, somebody hit her.”
“Someone you know? Or a stranger?”
“A stranger. Somebody going around saying something, then he came to her and punched her in the face. But she don’t like the hospital and she tell us if the ambulance comes she won’t go.”
The girl was called Zari, and her little brother was Darius. We followed them into a building, where Zari went up to a door and began to knock. No one answered. She knocked again, and rang the bell. We all waited.
Zari put her ear to the door. “She in there with someone.”
“You live in there too?” my partner asked.
Zari looked down. “No. She live there without us. We live with my sister.”
She knocked again, glancing hopefully at the door.
Finally, the door swung open. A man glanced at us, then walked away, indifferent, but a woman, beer can in her hand, leaned into the doorframe.
When she saw the children and several police officers, she looked surprised, then a little annoyed.
“Are you the person who’s hurt?” I asked.
“I’m not hurt,” she replied, giving Zari a look.
“Yes you are,” Zari insisted.
“No, I’m not.”
Zari looked at me, then pointed at her mother. “She’s hurt.”
She turned back to her mother. “Your lip is swollen.”
It was dark in the stairwell, but I could easily see what Zari was pointing at. Her mother’s lip was swollen to twice the normal size, the flesh red and raw.
Still holding the beer can in her right hand, the mother put her left hand on her hip and tried for a stern expression, undermined by the fact that she was having trouble staying upright.
“She say, ‘Your lip swollen.’ I tell her, ‘Oh no, I’m not hurt!’” Her voice was slurred and distorted, maybe partly from the swollen lip, but mostly, I suspected, from the beer and whatever else she was on. She scowled at Zari. “So why you call the ambulance?”
> There was a short pause, then her daughter spoke quietly. “Because, Mom, we care about you.”
“Okay. But I’m not hurt, though.”
“Yes you are. He hit you right in the mouth.”
For a moment, mother and daughter just looked at each other.
Zari won the battle of wills. Her mother turned to us, resigned, and nodded.
“He outside in the street. He probably still outside.”
We asked his name.
“His name is . . . Kent,” the mother said.
“Ken,” corrected Zari. “Kenny. She can’t remember.”
“Ken,” echoed Darius, coming up to stare at his mother’s swollen lip. He touched it gently.
“There’s an ambulance coming,” my partner put in. “They don’t need to take you to the hospital, but they should just check you out.”
The mother stepped back and gave a vigorous head shake. “I don’t need that.”
“She need to get checked out,” corrected Zari.
Once again, Zari prevailed. Darius ran outside to show the medics in, while their mother just stood there, shaking her head.
I started running through the usual questions: names, phone numbers. The mother (“Deandra, with a D, and an E and an aaaaandra”)—pursed her lips and started reciting a string of numbers, then stopped and laughed uproariously.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m fucking drunk! You ask for my phone number, and I give you my date of birth, not my phone number.” She chuckled at herself some more, then gave me another number.
She didn’t know Kent or Ken or Kenny’s last name, she maintained, nor what he looked like, nor where he lived, though she gestured vaguely to her left: “This way, I think.”
Once again, the children provided most of the missing details. Kenny had a beard and a mustache, they told us. (Deandra interrupted: “A what? A what?” but the kids ignored her.) He was short, and was last seen wearing a fluorescent yellow shirt “with some black or gray on it.”