By: Pete Johnson
Five
years ago I found myself in a situation where I was face to face with a dozen
or so incarcerated juveniles in Camden County, NJ, and I was supposed to teach
them about their Constitutional rights. It was hard and frustrating and early
in the morning, but it was rewarding. I got to tell these people things they
had never heard before,
like "there is such thing as the U.S. Constitution which is supposed to
pertain to you" and "NO NO NO PLEASE DON'T EVER ACTUALLY DO THAT
CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED THING YOU'RE CURRENTLY TALKING ABOUT BECAUSE THEN
THE COPS WILL SHOOT YOU AND YOU WILL BE DEAD."
It is
terrifying and crazy and not at all good that I found myself in this position
as a hungover 24 year old law student. My qualifications were being a law
student and also at some earlier point writing my name on a piece of paper
saying "hey, I'll do that thing." This is the person these kids were
learning this information from. Every person in America over the age of 11
should already know that there is a U.S. Constitution with guaranteed rights in
it that are supposed to apply to all Americans, and if you are a disadvantaged
black youth, it is also sadly necessary for you to be familiar with a long list
of Constitutionally protected things which you should nevertheless avoid doing
because if you did them the cops will shoot you and then you will be dead.
These kids should not have to commit a crime and then be locked in a room with
some random 24 year old law student who was maybe going to bail but then decided
to power through a hangover anyway in order to hear these things for the first
time.
Of
course, the list of excuses cops can rely on as a reason to kill you was not
actually on the syllabus. Originally I was supposed to talk about things like
what a cop can legally do to you during a search and what that means for you
later on in the court room. It quickly became clear that not only were those
things boring to my audience, they were not the kinds of things these kids
needed to hear. From a practical, don't-get-killed-by-a-policeman perspective,
these kids most needed to hear that their Constitutional rights, as people who
grew up where they grew up and looked like they looked, did not mean much. A
depressingly popular question was "so wait, the cops can't do
that?" I told them that while cops are not technically, like in a U.S.
Constitution way, supposed to do certain things which cops apparently would
nevertheless always do to these kids, these legal rights are pretty goddamned
moot when right then and there in the street the cops can and will do whatever
the fuck they want. Unfortunately for these kids, it seemed like the smart
thing was to concentrate on avoiding being murdered before engaging in any kind
of conversation about "rights."
This
was five years ago, and it is sadly still true that "cops sometimes shoot
black people for no reason" is a way better safety tip for these kids than
"don't run with scissors." I think it would be really cool if someday
there was a 24 year old hungover law student that found themselves locked in a
room in somewhere like the detention center in Camden with the task of teaching
some imprisoned children about their Constitutional rights, and that person
didn't even have to teach the "hey seriously guys the cops will murder you
sometimes if you say Constitutionally protected things like 'fuck you' to
them" portion of the course.
This
imaginary eventual 24 year old is probably not even born yet. 24 years is a
long time, but probably longer than it will take for "rights" to mean
more to black kids than "murder avoiding tips." It's a frustratingly
solvable problem. One idea is to put a camera on every cop all the time and
actually record the footage and save it from all the cops whose job it is to
lose important cop footage right after their buddy did something awful. I mean
we do definitely have the technology and everything, and it would only take a
small fraction of the money it took to give a every police force in Iowa a
fucking tank, but nah. Something that completely doable would take forever for
everyone important to agree on and to implement, and it would still be only a
small step towards really holding the police accountable.
The
role of police force in institutionalizing American racism is a complicated
issue that no one is solving any time soon. I like to think that all this
talking about it on the internet that is currently happening is helping in some
way, but it's still way easier to imagine reading a "Cops Still Doing This
Shit" headline in 10 years than it is to imagine ever reading
one that says "Internet Fixes Racism." If talking about it has even a
prayer of letting those future kids worry about something else, then good. Then
maybe someday that not even born yet hungover person could talk about other
things, and then the kids could get bored and start running with scissors, and
everyone would win.
