It’s obviously *very* different for myself as a middle-class white kid who grew up in a small town on the Canadian prairies compared to what’s happening to black people of all ages over and over again in cities across the US.
But I had one particular experience in high school that showed me how easy it was for a cop to overstep their bounds and how quickly a tense situation could escalate.
It was Halloween night in the late 1980s/early 1990’s and me some buddies were out wandering around our small hometown.
I admit, we were a bit old for trick or treating so instead, we may or may not have been doing what mischievous teens have done on Halloween nights for years.
A cop pulled up in his car beside us as we were walking, got out and tapped his baton on our pockets in case they were hiding eggs. Luckily, there were no eggs in our pockets but he told us to go home anyhow.
His aggressive tone, our naturally rebellious teen brains, and our extensive knowledge of the law, (gleaned mostly from watching “The People’s Court” after school every day!) had us believing he couldn’t force us to go home.
(Well, actually, we did go to my home but only briefly before my friends and I went out walking again. More on that later…)
And the next time, the cop saw us walking, he slammed his car to a sudden stop in front us right up on a sidewalk, nearly clipping one of my friends.
He jumped out and immediately started yelling at us – “I told you to go home! What are you still doing out here?” We were overly polite but the cop was getting more and more worked up and started saying stuff like “I have to live in this shit-hole town and if I do, I can make your life miserable for a real long time” and also things like “If I was your age and not wearing this badge, I’d climb aboard and teach you all a lesson” among other very charming comments (prompting one of my friends to whisper under his breath, “Try it!”. The cop turned on him in a threatening manner and said “What did you say?” which made me realise this wasn’t just fun and games anymore and we were inching dangerously close to escalating this to a whole other level.)
He again told us to go directly home but this time, he added that he would arrest us if he found us again. We told him we would and we did head for home…except for a brief stop at the home of another friend who couldn’t join us because he had a football injury. But we still wanted to talk to him – well, actually to his dad – because his dad was a town councillor and when we stopped back at my house earlier, we had …borrowed my dad’s mini-tape recorder and tape-recorded the whole second interaction with the cop where he called our town a shithole and threatened us among other things. (Yep, before ubiquitous smartphones, we still managed to document an incident of police misconduct!)
Our friend and his dad listened to the playback and were definitely surprised by what they heard. But it was a different time and though I think our friend’s dad knew that the cop was out of line (not ideal to be a town councilor and hear a RCMP officer call your town a “shithole”), he probably also realised we weren’t completely innocent and in the circumstances, best to let the whole thing drop as long as the cop didn’t follow through on any threats. “But hold on to that tape, just in case” our friend’s dad advised.
So, at least as far as I know, nothing further came of it – no apology from or discipline for the officer, no complaint to the RCMP, no transfer to another community.
I haven’t listened to, or even really thought about, that tape in years (though my friends and I still joke about “climbing aboard” anytime any fight-related topic comes up!)
But watching the protests and unrest grow across the United States, I’ve spent some time thinking about that early lesson that I – white, middle-class, a member of the high school football team and an honour roll student, safely ensconced in a small town where everybody knew everybody – still saw how quickly and easily a situation with the police could escalate into something threatening and potentially dangerous.
I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be a black person in the United States – with the legacy of slavery and continued racism, with the militarized police who have killed multiple civilians with impunity for little or no reason, with so much stacked against them in terms of economics, employment, housing, politics, legal system and more.
But I do know that I hope there’s real change in the United States. Finally.
