What to do about Crime installment 2 (Installment 1.3 v 1 of why I write such good books)

I’ll begin this essay with a crude story. Most of my readers know that I’m not averse to using other people’s or my own crude stories. This is because sanitized stories often lose their punch and instead of being food for thought it’s like going to a Tapas restaurant with 5 other niggers and noting there isn’t enough ‘tapas’. No one enjoys it because abundance is a full 1/2 of one’s sense of wellbeing. If it was not so prosperity preaching would not have told us so for the past 50 years. Oddly enough, America is worse off in nearly every regard than it was when prosperity ministries really gained popularity in the early 80’s; even more erosion and decadence has gone on in Black communities in the same time period.

I saw a similar story on Cops, only it didn’t end up the way my local West End/Bluff/ATL story ended. A highly agitated middle aged Black woman flags down a cop near the ‘Fair St Bottom’ area just downwind from the Atlanta University Center main street. We shall call him Officer Jackson and he stops, winds down the window and asks the woman what’s wrong…..thinking it is probably something domestic. And there she begins her lurid tale. Desperate for a crack fix, she made arrangements to perform oral sex on 2 young ‘dope boys’. She performed her side of the contract and the two young men appeared to fulfill theirs and gave her crack. Apparently however, the crack was either so bad as to be completely of no effect or was not even crack at all and perhaps was some material designed to look like crack.

This brings to mind my own similar lurid story. I’m college age trying to buy some weed. After being out of high school 2 years I decide on anecdotal evidence surely they must have some weed in Bowen Homes (that’s how long ago this incident took place as Bowen Homes and Bankhead Courts no longer exist). So my buddy and I drove around asking loiterers that looked like they might know if they knew where we could get some weed. Ladies and gentlemen, that is never a good idea and is an easy way to get robbed or locked up accidentally in a bust. So finally a guy says “I don’t have it on me but I can get it for you.” We were 19 or so, wet behind the ears, bourgeois knaves that not quite literally but yet just fell off the cabbage truck. We weren’t going to send our money off into the Bowen Homes myriad of buildings and courtyards. Of course the man suspected this and said “l’il brothers you can hold my crack until I get back with the weed.” He told us it was about $20 worth of crack and produced two whitish things I had never seen before. Not only was I horrified to even have something that possibly dangerous in my possession, I was trying not to show that my friend and I didn’t know a damn thing about crack. All we were thinking was what if the police stopped us and found $20 worth of crack on us. Jail time, that stain being on my record…..

As it turns out we needn’t have worried because what the old coot gave us was not crack rocks at all but chips and flakes of Ivory soap. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the man bought a 50 cent bar of soap, chipped and flaked an amount that looked enough like crack to fool two people who had never seen it before in their lives. He told us to hold it while he went and got our ‘dime’ of weed. I need not tell you after waiting approximately an agonizing 45 minutes and driving around Bowen Homes looking crazy asking has anybody seen dude we realized neither he nor our money, nor the weed were ever coming back. For that matter, all we had enough ‘crack’ (ivory soap) to do anything with was wash our mouths out.

In such circumstances what we did not do is flag down a police car and tell the story of how we got beat and that we want justice. The young lady in the opening crude story did. Now guess what the police officer (Officer Jackson) did? He told her to get in the car (in the front seat) and they drove to the trap where the two young dope boys were. He pulled up on the two men, let her out and said to them, “this lady tells me you owe her something.” They protested immediately that they didn’t know what on earth she possibly could be talking about, protesting they don’t even know her. He shut them up like Judge Judy before they could string even a few words together in a complete sentence of defense or defiance. Officer Jackson then said “I’m going to circle the block and come back to this spot and when I come back this lady better have what somebody was supposed to give her.” At a leisurely speed the officer indeed circled the block and when he returned to that spot the young woman had a smile on her face and the young men were no where to be seen.

Perhaps some of you are thinking wow, now that’s community policing; with the police acknowledging certain levels of dysfunction for an over all strategic relationship. Others of you are thinking that “Officer Jackson” needs to be disciplined and perhaps even fired for doing such a thing. Ladies and gentlemen of that opinion that woman is now a strategic asset. The dope boys know not to fuck with her because they know if they go too far, she ‘got a cop ear’ who’ll listen. The streets talk and yes all or nearly all the pimps, players, thugs, hustlers and gang cliques intersect and interact. Officer Jackson can see her at an appropriate time, give her a box of chicken and $10 and ask ‘what’s new in the neighborhood?’. And if she’s an old G, she’ll know enough to only tell the very, very important crimes not the misdemeanors….to give Officer Jackson enough that is credible and true for him to be in the mix but not always feeling like he or the police needs to be on a mission (which is not good either).

This young lady knows the streets, knows the game so she’s not telling on muthafuckas for nothing or for stupid ass reasons because that will get you killed fast. But if some thuggish niggas from somewhere else come to the hood causing problems and make the spot hot, or people get killed and it’s ‘them Florida boys’, ‘Decatur boys’, ‘Clayco boys’ or ‘Jamaican boys’ or somebody from somewhere else and not our ‘local dummies’ she’s going to let the police know ‘them boys who did it from somewhere else, it’s not our local dummies’.

Or perhaps her intel may be of another more personal nature to officer Jackson. “Watch out for that one Officer Jackson, he’s young, dumb and crazy, and them young boys be on them pills, geeked up, so if he’s on the radar screen have plenty of back up and don’t go by yourself.” If you were a policeman all things being equal, wouldn’t you prefer to know something like that before you interact with the dude at all. Whether intelligence you get as a cop from official sources is reliable or not, I’d be glad if a lady from the community told me that while I was on patrol one day. These are the kinds of cryptic wars against crime that cameras and simply increasing the volume of police aren’t as good as feet on the floor ‘assets’. This is life and death in ‘spycraft’.

Pt. II

While I’m telling crude real life stories I must mention that my sense of the police and how I contextualize their role is affected by the fact two of my best friends growing up are officers, one a detective with Clayton County, the other an officer with Dekalb. Reginald Scandret was a band captain in my years in the high school band at Mays. I played football with a guy who is now a Fulton County Sheriff. Labat I knew personally in High School. All I know more or less personally of a sort. Family members and respected members of my community and church growing up had careers in the military and law enforcement. My mother dated a sheriff. The fuck I look like going around saying ‘fuck the police’ and I know these niggas mamas’! All the American bureaucracies need reform and reinvigoration; municipal, county, state and federal but it’s in fashion now to symbolize all that need for reform by saying ‘fuc da police’. This is despite the irony that former gangster rapper, now loving coco reality show star and the singer of the infamous ‘cop killa’ song has made a fortune in the acting world playing street wise cops and detectives.

For that matter Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence parlayed cop imagery into box office success and varying levels of career success. On the show Steve Urkell was on the father was a cop. Brenda’s daddy in 227 played a cop. There was a Black cop on the Barney Miller show and who could forget the Black cop from the Police Academy series of movies that could imitate all sorts of noises. Now niggas are running around hollering ‘fuc da police’ and the equivalent of that ‘defund the police’…..in the middle of a mutha fuckin crime wave (frequently Black on Black) making your own self look stupid and contradicting your argument that the police are the most dangerous things in Black culture.

And of course your white liberal friends are playing you because while they will protest with you and make Trump and white social conservatives and evangelicals look bad they don’t want to live the same neighborhood as you, have their children go to the same schools as yours or live in a city where you are the politically and culturally dominant class. (Buckhead seeking separation?). We undermine our own argument against the police by the out of control nature of what is clearly OUR crime, allowing white conservatives like Kemp to completely ignore issues we raise about the police and keep hammering away at Atlanta and the out of control nature of the ‘urban’ crime problem. On the other hand our white liberal friends who we would like to think support us, are just using our dysfunction to their own, socialist, feminist and the LGBTQIA ends.

Pt. III

Here I will interject a true story about a terrible incident I had on or around my 29th birthday. I caught a felony weed distribution charge. It negatively affected my career, professional and financial condition from that very day on and still has not stopped. Another terrible incident that happened on my 37th birthday was I celebrating with a friend and we had scored some weed, gotten a couple 40s and we were riding around drinking and smoking in southwest Atlanta and South Fulton County. In the midst of smoking and drinking I ran smack dab into a road block at the corner of Fairburn and whatever road that is. I threw the still smoking blunt roach out of the window and had a beer bottle too big to shove under the seat. I pulled up to the road block, car reeking of marijuana. My 40oz was like favored banks in an economic crisis; ‘too big to fail’ (to be noticed). All I could do is try to slip it on the floor sorta under the seat with my feet pushing against it to keep it from rolling forward as I slow to a stop in front of 4 or 5 officers of mixed racial backgrounds.

Time we pull up to the check point he smells the burnt weed smell and tells me to and my best friend in high school and adolescence to get out the car and put our hands on the car and assume the position. At this point I made up in my mind I was going to jail and started thinking about who the hell I was going to call when I got down to the station. This is why I euphemistically call jail, ‘low income Black man summer camp’ and lament the fact it is so easy to enroll your sons, nephews and uncles in it at varying points in their lives. But as a Black man that knew the drill before I was 30 and had multiple encounters with the police it’s just something in your mind you prepare for. Talk about getting your game face on! Even deeper than who you call, you need to get yourself together so you know how fuckin act when you get there; namely mind your own muthafuckin business, don’t talk too much, don’t talk too little and as quickly as possible identify the lunatics, the young and dumb thugs who think part of the experience is finding somebody you can intimidate and the quiet people who just want to do their time and get the fuck out. While not worried about myself, I was worried about my friend who never having really been to jail, didn’t know the drill like I did. I easily envisioned him down there getting his ass kicked and I got to jump in and defend him until his mom, dad or older sister comes and gets him. Defending me, I got no problems with but having a ‘sidekick’ in jail that wasn’t quite as experienced in ‘hood life’ as I, I was not looking forward to….at all. That’s how you get ‘shanked’ defending somebody that said something really stupid to somebody looking to do stupid shit and they’ve listened to you say enough dumb shit for them to be confident they can get away with treating you like a joke.

There are some some moments in that horrible career trajectory with law enforcement when you might get off or the cop lets you go. I did not expect ANY leniency because I got caught red handed in the act of drinking and driving with a controlled substance on me. Smoke was emerging from the window when I slow rolled up to the police check and when he immediately told me to get out and assume the position, I figured it was a rap, get my mind right; note to self, ‘you are about to go to jail’. So the whole time I’m being completely compliant and answering each question yes sir, no sir, to the point that the officer told me I didn’t have to do that for each and every question. I kept on and told him this was how I was taught to interact with police. And truthfully it was no need to make their job hard or get my blood pressure up ragging and arguing with them, when in 40 minutes I’d be at the City Jail (if I was lucky) and Rice Street (Fulton County Jail) if I was not. I want no parts of Rice St. I did about 200 hours (yes 200 hours) of community service there and that was enough for me.

Handcuffed, we sat on the ground looking crazy as cars came by. The police had our 40s sitting on top of the car for the world to see. I tell them the story when they ask. It’s my birthday and we were out celebrating about to be on our way to a bar and grill to try to meet some sisters. Of course one of the keys to being financially impaired is getting relatively drunk before you get to the party and then purchasing drinks for the sisters and yourself to look cool and sip. The danger with that is getting too drunk before you get there and continuing the party when you get there and then like a bad ‘Dead Kennedy’s’ punk song, at the end of the night you end up ‘too drunk to fuck’. I thought we had timed it out pretty well…until we got to the road block.

They search the car looking for whatever and don’t find the weed. Believe it or not that old Buick had some good hiding places and I had shoved the weed in a little recess under the dashboard. In hindsight I should have told him the blunt was the only thing I had and stuck to my story. I started out with that story if for no other reason than not to get charged with the weed, but he interrogated me so strongly and then got me with this one……’if you tell me about it and where it is I might let it ride’ but if I find it you’re gong to get stuck with it’. 30 seconds in I told him where it was as I was handcuffed. He came back to the car and said he didn’t see it and asked me was I confused or lying about it. There is nothing worse to ask a poor educated Black man than whether or not he is confused. It’s insulting. I should have said, ‘yes sir I’m a little confused by all the hoopla and we just came from a friends house and maybe I left it’. But no, pride got in me and I said no sir I have a Masters degree, I’m not confused, it’s there. Dumbass me (wow that’s a complete sentence and lesson to other Black men in similar situations).

The cop went back to the car and came back again saying he couldn’t find it. By then I’d rather go to jail than have people think I’m stupid or crazy. Would you believe the cop uncuffed me and told me to get it. I went right to it and gave it to him. It was a little less than 1/4 ounce of weed. Even though I told him it was all mine (I had a record with a felony conviction already for weed there was no need to stick a stupid charge on my friend from high school’s record) they still asked my friends questions. As I stated earlier I knew the ‘Black man summer camp drill’. My friend unfortunately did not and this 40 year old nigga was traumatized like a muthafucka to the point I knew when we got to jail I was going to get my ass kicked trying to defend him. This nigga went to stuttering and sounding crazy. The worst thing he’d experienced before this is he was drinking in the gazebo between the library and Cascade Rd Publix and the police walked up on him and gave him a ticket for that and urinating in public (apparently they had been watching him a while).

I on the other hand had learned the Black man hustler’s code which is to say’; it is very easy to get locked up, like rain or morning dew. For most ‘Americans’ of other races you have to be at the wrong place at the wrong time; when you are a Black man it’s so often the wrong time and wrong place, like you were born into the wrong place and the wrong time and thus to be involved in ‘in some incident’ is more often than not a question of ‘when’ you get locked up and not ‘if’. And as a Black man you can never really say it won’t happen again. Even if you really don’t believe that you will do anything criminal in some of the neighborhoods I’ve spent my young adulthood, there has to be a line of thought in your mind like you can go to jail any minute just from being around here! You can be walking down the street and the police say they’re looking for somebody and sit you and 3 other niggers down on the street you don’t even know asking questions. As you protest your innocence, they are loading you in the back of the police cruiser and advising you of your rights. And as you protest they are telling you it’ll get sorted out at the station.

I say all that to say I was kinda used to getting locked up….my high school buddy, not so much. So by now he’s stuttering and stammering, slobbering and I had already told him just to chill and that they would probably/possibly let him go as he was not driving and I claimed all the weed. He wasn’t driving and thus could not be charged with a DUI and I claimed all the weed, just fucking relax. That nigga damn near shit himself. Finally the cop asked me what was wrong with him and could I calm him down, which I did. Furthermore I explained to the cop that I felt the reason he was…uh…not emotionally present and saying weird inappropriate things was because his mother had recently died and he was attempting to assuage the bereavement situation by drugs and alcohol (like Sha’Cara Willis the sprinter). We sat there ‘center stage’, handcuffed on the ground another 15 to 20 minutes as they checked other cars and licenses.

Then they came back, gave me my license and told me to take my friend home and go straight home do not pass ‘START or GO’ and if we see you again tonight you’re going to jail. Well, that’s what I call ‘nigger bungee jumping’ (all the adrenaline and the fear without the actualized risk)! All the sensation and visceral forces of getting locked up but not actually getting locked up!

I have one other example of an experience I had ‘nigga bungee jumping’ with the police. Which is to say, every stage happens of getting locked up but in the end you don’t…’nigga bungee jumping’ with the police. True story. The day before I was supposed to go before the board of ordained ministry in my religious denomination and get rejected for the 3rd time I was in the Bluff coming from seminary class and stopped off to get a 1/4 of weed. In my impatience I’m like shit Imma light my shit up now and ride home smoking and drinking. NO, that wasn’t my biggest error in judgement. The only way to look at the Bluff from the streets standpoint is that it’s a ‘gigantic trap’, a gigantic ‘dope spot’, 2 or 3 square miles of straight trap etc. Whether this street or that, this intersection or that, at any given time, everybody trapping, trapping dope, trapping pussy and yes, even transvestite prostitution. Which is to say, assuming you can just drive around with the windows down smoking weed when the area is heavily patrolled by police is idiotic. Addiction often does those kinds of things to you.

I cut through from Boone/Simpson to Ashby/Lowery and ran right into a dope bust where the 3 or 4 cop cars and even the paddy wagon had blocked off the street. I stopped, once again reefer smoke coming out of the windows and tried to turn around…the bust didn’t have anything to do with me, I reasoned. I turned a corner and them police looked at me like a runner!

I have seen the effects (a beating) of running from the police on more than one occasion though it has never happened to me personally. Once some friends and I were on the block hustling. I was more chilling than anything else because by then I was slightly higher than street sales (only slightly). One day the SLED unit (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division something like the SWATT teams or Red Dawg Units), ran up on us in unmarked cars. Most of us, even the ones with ‘work’ on them just froze like I did, it happened so fast. My partner, his nickname was ‘Thirty’. Everybody called him that. One day I asked him how he got that nickname. At one point in his life he was $30 short on something he wanted to buy. Actually I think he wanted to buy some dope. He went around for weeks trying to come up with and/or borrow $30 and from then on out everybody in the clique called him ‘thirty’. He was an alright dude, I hope he’s doing well and fairing well in life.

Anyway, as soon as the SLED pulled up on us 3 unmarked cars deep and jumped out ‘thirty’ took off. The next time we saw him was 4 weeks later on crutches with a bandage around his head. They caught up with him a couple streets over and ‘beat the breaks off him’. He had a warrant for just some stupid shit and he had ‘work’ on him and I knew they do not like it when you make them run and feel like they have to beat your ass when you run no matter what the reason you ran is or might be! They beat him so bad, when he came out and I saw him and his girl she had to help him walk. Over the course of the next few months and years before I got run out of town myself, I saw him regularly and his old personality really never came back. No joke.

So when I made the turn on Proctor st in the Bluff and I saw the police take off towards me in the rear view mirror I pulled over immediately and held my hands up in the muthafuckin car. I feel like Muhammad Ali ironically, I’m to ‘pretty’ to get hit in the face and do not take the possibility lightly. That and AIDS is why I don’t fight anymore. If you and me get to tangling ‘there will be blood’ because I’m not swinging to swing, talk shit and make noise; I’m swinging to connect with your face, nose, jaw, lips or eyes if you or someone else connects often enough there ‘will be blood’ and I can’t be out here mixing blood with folk ‘willy-nilly’ so my fist fighting days are over (that is unless properly motivated).

The police cruiser pulled up behind my car and he got with his gun drawn and told me to ‘get the fuck out the car’! I complied innocently asking was there a problem I was just going to my friend’s house. He said “no you were coming to buy some more weed” and the spot was busted so you drove off. I told him I already had some weed and I didn’t even know that was a trap (which was true). But that was his story and he was sticking to it. I was like damn, I’m going to miss getting rejected the third time by the Board of Ordained Ministry tomorrow because I will be in jail! Ain’t that a bitch. As I stated before he put me against the car and I assumed the position as he put the cuffs on and I began getting my mind right to go back to ‘poor Black man summer camp’ AGAIN.

He walked me back to his cruiser and put me in the back. It’s cramped, the seat is uncomfortable and as I told you cuffs are always too small. One time they had to put two pair of cuffs strung in line on me. So I’m sitting in the back and he’s in the front as he calls in my info and runs my record. I’m extremely respectful but silent as I have already started getting my mind right to go to ‘poor Black man summer camp’ AGAIN and the last thing you want to do is cast a first impression where you’re bitching and crying about some bullshit. Imma nigga, it’s Black man summer camp, I know the fucking drill!

At this point he had the weed sitting on top of my car. I’m in the back of his cruiser and he starts talking to me about like, regular shit, sorta like ‘what you doing on this side of town’ and that kind of thing. I tell him I’m in graduate school at the AUC and I gotta friend over here and I smoke weed and drink sometimes after class and shit. I sat back there another 10 minutes or so, extremely uncomfortable but silent and feeling claustrophobic but as I said, I had to remain calm so that when I got to ‘poor Black man summer camp’ I would be cool calm and collected not whacked out my fucking mind crying and bitching. That’ll get a target on your back fast.

The door opens and he tells me to get out. I get out and he takes the cuffs off. At this point I still don’t know what is going on but I am 100% compliant as I said, in most of my experiences with the police ‘an ass whooping’ is pretty easy to get. It is not hard, just run and talk shit. Now I have a suspicion they don’t give them out as frequently as they used to for legal reasons and phone cameras but in my hustling days 25 to 30 years ago it was super easy to get an ass whooping. The police didn’t go for questioning them and telling them about your got damn rights as a citizen of the USA. When I was running the streets, that was interpreted as they need to give you your right to remain silent and your right to an ass whooping!

So I silently waited on him to tell me what to do next. He told me to take my weed off the top of the car, throw it on the ground stomp, ground and grind on it with my feet, which I obliged. He then told me to get in my car, drive away and that this is his beat and if he ever sees me again in this neighborhood he will detain me on sight to assess my purpose for being there. Furthermore he said my car smells like weed and I should go straight home because if I’m stopped by another policeman I might not get off so easily. I got in my car and drove off. I still got rejected for the third time by the Board of Ordained Ministry the next day, but it was not because I was in jail at the time.