The stories and headlines are piling up.
Police called on black men for sitting in a Starbucks.
An off-duty police officer pulls his gun on a brown man for buying Mentos.
Police called on a black university student for taking a nap in a common area.
Police called on two American Indian teenagers for being on a college tour.
Police called on black women for golfing too slowly.
Police called on black airBNB guests for not smiling and waving.
Police called on a black family for cooking out in a public park.
Police called on a mentally ill black man in his shower, and they kill him.
Police called...you get the idea.
White people, we're clearly strung out on calling the cops on people of color and mentally ill people, and it has to stop. Law enforcement has historically been weaponized against people of color in ways that it never has been, and likely never will be, against us.
For six and a half years, I served as the pastor of a church in the heart of a town with massive addiction, mental healthcare, and homelessness needs. Intervening with homeless people, mentally ill people, and people in active addiction simply became a part of my job description. But in my time there, we only had to call the cops on a person once (excluding a few false alarms when our central alarm system went off because someone hadn't fully secured a door or somesuch). Before then, I served briefly as the chaplain of an inpatient psychiatric ward in the heart of San Francisco. That work on the psych ward was some of the most challenging *and* most rewarding ministry that I have ever done.
In both of those ministry contexts, I learned an awful lot about whether and how to act without involving the police, and I made
a public note to myself
to sometime soon put those lessons into a blog post. This is that post, and what follows are the crib notes of what I have learned from years of experience. Heed these notes well.
First and foremost, unless, someone actually presents an immediate existential threat to you, LEAVE THEM THE FORK ALONE. The vast, vast majority of us are just trying to make our way in this broken world. Snitching on someone who isn't doing a damn thing other than existing in your vicinity is an act of violence against another human being, and should be treated and shamed as such. And for people of color, that vicinity of yours they're existing in is probably a majority-white vicinity. Take a moment and try to appreciate just how exhausting that continuous experience is.
Second, when confronted with people who are mentally ill or in active addiction, make yourself aware of community resources that have nothing to do with law enforcement. Do you know the phone number of protective services in your county? Do you know the phone number of a local homeless shelter or battered families shelter? There are so many resources in many communities that have the capacity to help, and as an enormous added bonus, they don't carry guns with them. Do some Googling. Reach out and make some connections with agencies in your community. Then, when you're legit worried about someone who is disconnected from reality (whether due to mental illness, addiction, trauma, and so on), you have a ready-to-go rolodex in your phone to intervene so that you and the cops don't have to. Unless you are that person's social worker, neither you or the cops are best-trained or equipped to intervene. Get connected with a person who is trained and equipped to intervene, even if it is only to register your concern. That way, at least this person is on their radar if they weren't already.
Third, cultivate some long-overdue self-awareness. What is really making you consider calling the police right now? Why is that your first instinct? Why are you perceiving a threat to yourself? Is it the person's appearance? Behavior? Skin color? Or, an actual threat to your physical wellbeing? This is something that I have had to grow acutely aware of as a massively built, tan-skinned man with a shaved head and a beard. I regularly see people recoil or shrink away from me simply for existing near them. The way I was seen and treated in airports after 9/11 (and simply in general sometimes from 2016 onward) was mortifying. But that pales in comparison to existing as a person of color in this country. If I were the exact same size, but Black, I cannot begin to imagine the number of times the cops would have been called on me. Our whiteness does not lend itself to empathy, but try to reach for it. Another human being's life may depend on it.
Fourth, dismantle that sense of entitlement to space. This space was not, and is not, ours. We took it at the tip of the sword and bayonet from the tribes of American Indians, and we enforce that entitlement to space now with cops. Even though I was the pastor of a church, I knew that the church's space in the center of town did not belong to me. Like the Starbucks, legally it was privately-held land, yes, but it still functioned as communal space. People stopping by to rest on our steps or relax under one of our giant fir trees were welcomed. And rather than simply kick homeless people who were living on our space out, our secretary and I worked on a letter we could give them explaining that while we couldn't permit them to live on the church grounds, we were well-positioned to help them into a shelter or to find permanent housing, and outlining the ways in which we could assist them if that was something they chose. If the person wasn't there, the letter was left on their belongings rather than immediately clearing their belongings out. Calling the police to remove a person is a demonstration of ownership over space, not coexistence within space.
Finally, recognize that none of these stories took place in a vacuum. They are not isolated. There are common denominators to them, and to so many other stories of calling police officers to situations where they are not needed or could make matters much worse. Our culture of individualism is toxic in many ways, but its willingness--eagerness, even--to exonerate us because we weren't the person who made the call to the police is particularly destructive. Like Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus to death, we permit ourselves to be complicit in someone else's violent death while simultaneously washing our hands and proclaiming ourselves innocent of their death.
Like Pilate, however, we are fooling ourselves. It was Pilate's death sentence that sent Jesus to Golgotha. It was a person's 911 call that sent
Adam Trammell to his death. And it could be a 911 call from someone else that leads to another person of color's death, or another mentally ill person's death, at the hands of a latter-day Pilate.
We have created hand-washing stations for ourselves in every call to 911 we make, in the weaponized tears of a white person called out for their racism, and in our resistance to the fact that every time we call the police on a person of color, we make that person very, very afraid of what will happen to them next.
No more.
We can keep being a part of the problem--or, rather, simply being the problem--or we can finally recognize that treating the police like personal ringers in petty grievances with people of color is overtly racist and indefensibly destructive.
What's it going to be, y'all?
Vancouver, Washington
May 11, 2018