Run chillun run, the pattyroller git you -- Run chillun run, it's almost day.
-- Slave song
One evening in the 1940's, a young James Baldwin took the subway downtown to 42nd Street, just to see what was going on in midtown Manhattan. A policeman asked him what he was doing there, then told him to go back to Harlem where he belonged.
One evening in the 1950's, a young Tom Phillips walked out of a bar in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, in the poorer section of town around the railroad station. Emerging from a parked patrol car, a policeman asked me what I was doing "in there." I said I was having a beer. He informed me that everyone else in the bar was black. "So what?" I said. At this he grew defensive. He had nothing against black people, he said, he'd "worked with them for many years." It was just that I didn't belong there.
Neither of these events would be likely today. Black people are common on 42nd Street, which has become an urban extension of Disney World. And the poorer parts of Roslyn have been torn down to make way for parking lots and condominiums. My classmate and teammate Sam Brown, whom I saw in that bar that night, now lives in Roosevelt, farther out in a suburbia that has become more segregated as it has grown more affluent. Such are the changes over time, but the basic principle remains: each race has its place. And the cops will let you know it.
The racist style of policing in the United States can be traced to slavery. In the North as well as the South, slaves had no legal rights, but were subject to draconian "slave codes." In 18th-century New York, they could not gather in groups of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern. In the South, curfews were enforced and runaways pursued by armed Slave Patrols. "Patty-rollers" in Virginia were authorized to kill any slave who dared to "absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places."
Keeping the peace meant protecting white lives and property. And though slavery ended with the Civil War, no one told the police to change their racial views. Most cops I have come in contact with still consider this an essential part of their job.
Sometimes it takes benign forms. The first time my teenage daughter took the subway to my apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, she got on the wrong train and wound up in central Harlem -- 110th and Lenox instead of 110th and Broadway. She wandered uptown, looking for familiar landmarks, completely lost. A police car pulled up and the cops asked her where she thought she was going. Alarmed by a white girl in the ghetto, they drove her to my house.
No such chivalry was granted to a young black woman we once rescued from domestic abuse. My wife sent me downstairs to break up a screaming fight between the building superintendent and his daughter. We brought her upstairs, in shock, her clothing ripped, and called the police. They took down the report. She had a relative a few blocks away where she could take refuge. I asked the cops if they could drive her there, and they refused. "We're not a taxi service," they said.
A few years ago I picked up another daughter at JFK Airport in the early morning, and drove home over the Triboro Bridge, onto 125th Street. It was 4 a.m. A police car pulled me over near Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and a fresh-faced patrolman looked into the car. The question was unspoken, but obvious: what was an elderly white guy doing in Harlem at 4 a.m.? When he saw my daughter and heard my explanation, all was well.
These days I have few problems with the cops. Gray-bearded and incapable of fighting, I get out of traffic tickets -- even driving the wrong way on a one-way street, right past a police station. I was confused. OK, be more careful.
It was not always so. In the early 1960s I was a long-haired hippie, hitch-hiking across the West, when I ran afoul of Sheriff C.W. Ogburn in Rawlins, Wyoming.
-- We don't allow hitch-hikers around here, said the burly lawman.
-- Why?
-- We've had rapes and murders, that's why.
He shoved me in the back of his car and radioed headquarters that he was "just cleanin' up the road." I was sentenced to 19 days in jail, in a cell with a black kid from Detroit -- also in for hitchhiking -- and a local Hispanic, in for fighting in a bar. Each of us, in our way, was an affront to community standards, a threat to stability. When I got out, Sheriff Ogburn called me into his office to say:
-- Don't ever show your face in Rawlins again.
We hippies eventually had our day, and now Black people are having theirs -- a full-blown challenge to the established order. Hispanics await their own. And the cops are ready to take us on, convinced that they are protecting something of value.
Last year the New York City police union broke with its non-partisan tradition and endorsed President Trump for re-election. Speaking at Trump's golf resort in New Jersey, union president Gerald Lynch said, "Mr. President, we're fighting for our lives out there. We don't want this to spread to the rest of the country."
By "this," Lynch presumably meant the wave of demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, in which protesters confronted police with charges of brutality. The NYPD reacted petulantly -- withdrawing from the streets, then pushing the narrative that crime was "out of control." Their message to white America was clear: you need us to protect you.
Lynch went on to blast politicians for "blaming us for society's ills," and there he may have a point. The police are not philosophers. They are not charged with improving the world -- just keeping the peace, i.e. the status quo.
Maybe the best way to reform the cops is to change the status quo. And this time, tell them about it.
-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment