I got pulled over a couple of weeks back.
Your heart sort of drops when you see the flashing lights in your mirror. It’s a horrible feeling. What did I do? Was I going that fast? Did I forget to signal back there? Crap. My wife’s going to kill me.
Turns out I had let my tags lapse. So I sat there behind the wheel on the side of the road… late for dinner, stressed out, feeling stupid, wondering what could be taking the cop so long, and worrying about the price of a ticket.
The trooper came back to my car, handed me my license, and then sent me off in my unregistered vehicle with little more than a light warning and a nice smile. ”Get into the DMV tomorrow and get that taken care of, okay? Now, be careful pulling back into traffic.”
Next day, I told that story to a black woman in my office. She just smiled and barely shook her head.
“I know,” I said. “Pretty stupid, huh?”
“No. It’s not that. Just wondering who would have bailed me out if jail if I got pulled over in an unregistered car.”
…
Wednesday, July 22nd 2009 at 1:56 pm |
I can assure you that your collegue was not being paranoid. I’ll give you a first hand example.
I was on a date with a guy in the suburbs of Detroit, specifically Oakland county. (This is where the County Executive, L. Brooks Patterson, who is white, was pulled over from drunk driving and all the police did was escort him home.) My date and I were leaving a party and were pulling out of the parking lot, across the lanes to get into the 3rd lane to do the “legal” turn-around. My date was not drunk and had not been drinking because we knew that we were pushing it by driving at night, in Oakland County, while black. He was the designated driver.
While waiting in the “turn-around” two sportscars whizzed right by us. We pulled out and went litterally 20 feet, and we saw the sirens. We didn’t “peel out” or anything! We pulled into the well-lit, gas station at the corner where we were asked to step out of the car. While we got out, 2 more patrol cars, one of which was a K-9 unit pulled up. The dog barked and barked at us incessantly from INSIDE THE CAR! We prayed that they would not let him out.
We were never told why we were pulled over when we asked and of course the search of the car turned up nothing. Unfortunately, his license was expired and they handcuffed him, arrested him and took him to jail. My date gave me his cell phone and instructed me on who to call to bail him out. Meanwhile, I ask the officers if I can ride to the station so someone can pick me up and they told me no. They wouldn’t let me take the car, nothing. I said, ” How am I supposed to get home from here? It’s 3 AM. There are no busses and no cabs riding by. It’s a 12 mile walk home from here. ” The officer told me, “Well, we don’t have to give non-residents rides home.” These are the same people who escorted the Oakland County Executive home drunk. AND i just wanted a ride to the station!
So they left me, standiing on the corner in my party dress out in the suburbs with no way to get home at 4 AM. (The whole ordeal took an hour.
And to make matters worse, my date was arrested on a Friday which means they held him until Monday to be arraigned, assigned some exorbitant bail amount (which he couldn’t cover) and kept him in jail for 5 weeks. For no license and “resisting arrest”.
But we shouldn’t be paranoid about driving while Black.
Wednesday, July 22nd 2009 at 12:58 pm |
How does a Harvard professor get arrested in his own house? No racial profiling there, huh? Never mind that probably never happened to anyone else. I mean never happened to any other African-American Harvard professor. lol Keep excusing this type of police behavior. That’s the real problem. How much outrage was displayed for the one case of white firemen in history that didn’t get promotions because a whole city might have gotten sued? They tried to defame a judge who made a group decision to go with the law instead of trying to create a new one. Did you see the outrage on all those white men? It’s like that happened more than once. Kind of a double standard there. Black people forget about all the cases in the last 10 years, but remember the firemen.
Wednesday, July 22nd 2009 at 12:51 pm |
she’s justified, i think, to some degree (i wouldn’t go as far as jail, but i’ve definitely gotten a ticket for something similar that didn’t warrant one, IMO–was completely respectful of cop too).
i will say though, that if you have small, cute kids in the car, you sometimes get a pass. i know this from experience, as well.
maybe ‘cos the kids looked mixed though and i had a welshman in the passenger side, i’ll never know, LOL
j.
Wednesday, July 22nd 2009 at 12:38 pm |
http://twitter.com/harryallen/statuses/2783674402
Friday, July 17th 2009 at 8:56 am |
BJ, thanks for the comment. That’s my strong natural response, too. I am starting to wonder, however, if there isn’t more of this than you and I might ever imagine.
I didn’t finish the story. I pushed back on my colleague: “Seriously? That seems sort of paranoid.” Well, yes, except that this is exactly what happened to her brother not long before I got pulled over. He had to leave his car by the side of the road, go back the station in the back of a cruiser, and call for someone to come get him. (Not the same as being “bailed out,” I know… but also not the same as driving off in your unregistered vehicle.)
Could have just been a by-the-book, Joe Friday sort, I suppose. But you can understand why she might wonder. This same woman tries to avoid driving after dark. Says she’s been pulled over too many times to count, and that the first question is always some variation of, “Have you been drinking, maam?”
I don’t know. Maybe she’s a bad driver. Maybe she’s paranoid, or likes to exaggerate. Or maybe she’s had enough experiences to leave her completely jaded.
Your thoughts?
Friday, July 17th 2009 at 8:29 am |
Jim,
thanks for the post. I read every post on this blog, even though I almost never comment. Keep it up (to all contributors)!
On this one, though, I’ve got to call shenanigans.
Look, there is no doubt that black men and women often face discrimination or, at the least, differing treatment than white drivers do from cops. But it is far from universal. And for her to assume that in the same situation you were warned on she’d be in the slammer is, frankly, ridiculous. It assumes, without any warrant to do so, that the cop in question is a blatant racist. It also assumes that there would be a massive over-use of force (throwing her in jail?) for a minor, paltry offense — all because of her race. Hey, I’m sure it has happened before. But come on.
Again: I have no doubt that this woman is probably justified in her skepticism and cynicism. I’ll even assume that she has been the direct victim of racist cops in the past. Still… to look for a “racist act under every rock” is part of the whole problem, I think. Sometimes we have to relax and stop trying to play up such fears and non-existent indiscrepancies when there is no reason or need to.