Tuesday, December 11, 2007
“These cops got to stop this. They’re shooting people like crazy....”
Candlelight vigil for Khiel Coppin - I pray no-one ever has to do one of these for me!
I was gonna do a post about how f-cked up the NYPD was after the Khiel Coppin murder but never found the time to get to it. Then again after the one year anniversary of the Sean Bell shooting and the murder of David Kostovski with my angle being that, as a Black male in NYC, I am and have good reason to be scared of the NYPD, but again didn't get to it. But an incident that happened to me personally last Friday night sealed the deal and prompted me to finally write this post and stop wasting my time with the usual BS about mp3's, mixtapes, new videos, sneakers, George Bush and Iraq until I got this off my chest.
So I'm about to walk the one block to my apartment from the subway after hanging out for a bit with some co-workers after our annual office holiday party. It's about 1:30am and as I come out of the station I see an NYPD van parked in the middle of the road with a bunch of cops around it and one white civilian woman. I briefly make eye contact with the woman and glance at some of the cops but keep walking without paying any of them any particular mind. As I approach the gate to my apartment complex though I notice the van has passed me by and is now right outside my building with the cops all coming out of it. "What's going on?" I wonder but just as I'm about to go to put the key in the gate to my apartment, they call out to me:
"Excuse me sir, where are you coming from?"
"From the city," I reply confused.
"Where exactly?
"From Lafayette and Canal."
Now I'm getting nervous and stuttering 'cos literally five or six HUGE cops are now surrounding me and towering over my skinny ass. I could barely remember the info I just gave them and am kicking myself cos, if they start asking me more detailed questions, I don't even know the name of the bar I've just been hanging out in for the past hour even though I even had the flyer in my back pocket (as I discovered later). I hadn't done anything wrong but I felt nervous, jumpy and guilty just having these dudes looking at me like I'm some kind of a suspect.
"Can we see some ID? There's been a crime reported in the area."
Now I'm kicking myself again 'cos I'm not even sure of what my rights are in a situation like this and whether I can refuse to give them my ID but I'm starting to resent their attitude and wondering exactly how many white dudes they've been stopping and questioning on the street during the course of their 'investigation.'
At this point one of the cops (Black by the way) is writing my info in his notepad, or at least pretending to write something down. "What are they gonna do with my information?" I wonder absent-mindedly. It's getting cold standing out there so I try to put my hands in my pockets to keep them warm 'cos I don't have any gloves on.
"Excuse sir, can you keep your hands visible? For officer safety, you understand?"
Officer safety??!!! You gotta be kidding me! Y'all are the ones killing defenseless Black men on a regular basis, not the other way around. At this point I can't even look at them I'm so disgusted at the accusatory looks and hostility they are all throwing my way. I mean, "Do I really look like the suspect they're allegedly after or even a suspect of any kind... that might have a gun?" I scream out in my mind. I get depressed considering what their answer might have been if I'd asked that out loud. They hand me back my license and are on their way. Maybe they said good night, I don't know or remember - I wanted to get inside so quick I wasn't even processing what was going on by this point - I just wanted it to be over. I was inside my apartment a good 1/2 hour before I even felt calm enough to go tell my roommate (my sister) what had happened.
In the grand scheme of things this was a small incident some might say but I was left feeling about this small: humiliated, angry and powerless. This wasn't the first time something like this has happened to me but it was the first time I really got a sense of how, if I was different kind brother, in a different part of town who looked a little different than how I usually do, things could have ended in a different, much worse way. I felt so angry at how I was being treated that I wanted to hit one of them in frustration even though I knew that that was the worst of all the bad ideas I could have had at that time. It's a short jump of barely a couple hours from being someone who's celebrating the end of a successful professional year and some great news I got last week with friends & colleagues at a holiday party to being driven into the kind of rage that could have got me killed if I hadn't played it cool. I'm a smart, educated and generally articulate dude but these guys intimidated me into not even being able to defend myself verbally and I hated them and myself for letting them do that.
The scary thing though is that stuff like this or even worse or more disrespectful, happens to people who look like me probably countless times every day without anyone taking notice. Yet everyone acts shocked when another shooting or murder that does make the headlines or the top of the news show leads to the kind of outrage in the black community you saw around the Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Khiel Coppin murders and wonder where it comes from. Just don't be surprised if the next time that N.W.A classic comes on, you hear me yelling FUCK (NO edits this time around) the Police! and really mean it based on my own little personal experience and not just from an academic, theoretical or faux sense of outrage. And God bless Al Sharpton. I don't give a fuck what people say about him - he may not be always right or totally sincere but he's out there calling these cops out on their f-ckery, fighting the good fight for those that can't defend themselves and giving a voice to those who aren't heard when they try to speak for themselves.
Related:
"Today makes one year, and I have yet to hear from a police officer. No one has offered me condolences. No one has said anything to myself or Mr. and Mrs. Bell." Sean Bell fiancée, Nicole Paultre-Bell. [NY1]
Updated 12/17/07:
This week's Village Voice cover story on how the NYPD's blackly grim stop-and-frisk numbers got whitewashed.
Labels: David Kostovski, Khiel Coppin, NYPD, Sean Bell, US race relations
