I'm guessing that many people have noticed me talking about police-community relations during the past year. (Though not on this blog. Until now.)
This is not a new topic for me, but something that I've been thinking about for the last 15+ years. So I wanted to share a few of my own experiences.
Growing up White, I didn't think particularly much about the police. My grandfather was a California Highway Patrolman and later the chief of police of two small towns. I had several friends whose fathers were cops. But our town was rural and very quiet, and I never interacted with police officers in any official capacity.
In college I moved to a big city, learned more US History, and started to get a more diverse range of inputs on the impact that policing had on daily life for various communities. At a Christian conference I attended during my senior year, I heard stories about the disproportionate manner in which Black people were often treated by police in comparison with White people. But since very few people in my college were Black and most of my own police experiences were simply local cops coming to parties in response to noise complaints, I never got involved with anything myself.
This changed the summer after I graduated from college. I started graduate school and my first professor was an African-American woman who had recently moved to town from a nearby city. She was a Ph.D and an author, had been an award-winning teacher for many years, and was a professional in every sense. In fact, I learned more about teaching from that first class with her than I did in all my later classes combined, and to this day I would say that she was my all-time favorite professor. (I also took my final graduate school class with her.) But she had one story that had nothing to do with teaching that stuck out to me.
About halfway through the summer, our professor came to class in a perturbed mood. She complained that her son had just received his second jaywalking ticket since they had moved to town. Both tickets had been given in "The Village", a heavy-commerce part of town with a walking culture, where cars moved slowly and people frequently crossed the street wherever they wanted.
That shocked me. I had lived in this town for four years, and had never received a jaywalking ticket even though I jaywalked all the time. I couldn't recall any of the other college students I knew receiving a jaywalking ticket. But this 17-year-old Black teenager had already picked up two jaywalking tickets in his first couple of months?
There had been rumors that our mostly-White, middle-class college town had some racial animosity towards Black people. A major police incident involving a young Black man had occured two years earlier, and there was an idea that racial animosity was particularly prevalent among city officials and the police. There were strong suspicions of systematic racial profiling, but the local police department had refused to take racial statistics on officer stops. Until now it hadn't affected anyone I knew.
So I decided to run a test. I would purposely jaywalk across the biggest, busiest road in town at least 6 times every day for 6 months. I would make a concerted effort to violate the jaywalking laws as often as possible, to see if a 21-year-old White man could possibly pick up the same tickets that a 17-year-old Black man had picked up.
I embarked on this experiment, not fearing the consequences, because I was almost certain that I already knew what would happen.
Sure enough, six months and approximately 1500 jaywalking incidents later, I was still ticketless. I had jaywalked every day as often as I could without any policeman ever choosing to pull me over. I'm not certain how many times a cop saw me jaywalk, but there were 7 incidents where I "illegally" stepped out onto the road directly in front of an officer's car. In one incident the officer had to hit the brakes to avoid me. Yet not once did any officer even stop to talk to me or give me a warning. My jaywalking simply wasn't relevant to their police duties.
I reached the six month mark of my experiment confident that some laws didn't apply to me the same way they applied to other people. It wasn't a perfect experiment. I am certain that White people occasionally get ticketed for jaywalking in our community. But it seemed too much of a coincidence that one of the very few Black men I knew would get 2 tickets within a couple months of moving into the community, while I couldn't get a ticket in 6 months no matter how hard I tried to keep violating the same rules in the most outlandish manner. To this point in my life I have still never, ever been ticketed for jaywalking, despite the fact that I do a rather poor job of obeying the law in this regard.
The experiment stuck with me, and I as moved to a new community the next year, I experienced disparity in police treatment in a new environment.
This is not a new topic for me, but something that I've been thinking about for the last 15+ years. So I wanted to share a few of my own experiences.
Growing up White, I didn't think particularly much about the police. My grandfather was a California Highway Patrolman and later the chief of police of two small towns. I had several friends whose fathers were cops. But our town was rural and very quiet, and I never interacted with police officers in any official capacity.
In college I moved to a big city, learned more US History, and started to get a more diverse range of inputs on the impact that policing had on daily life for various communities. At a Christian conference I attended during my senior year, I heard stories about the disproportionate manner in which Black people were often treated by police in comparison with White people. But since very few people in my college were Black and most of my own police experiences were simply local cops coming to parties in response to noise complaints, I never got involved with anything myself.
This changed the summer after I graduated from college. I started graduate school and my first professor was an African-American woman who had recently moved to town from a nearby city. She was a Ph.D and an author, had been an award-winning teacher for many years, and was a professional in every sense. In fact, I learned more about teaching from that first class with her than I did in all my later classes combined, and to this day I would say that she was my all-time favorite professor. (I also took my final graduate school class with her.) But she had one story that had nothing to do with teaching that stuck out to me.
About halfway through the summer, our professor came to class in a perturbed mood. She complained that her son had just received his second jaywalking ticket since they had moved to town. Both tickets had been given in "The Village", a heavy-commerce part of town with a walking culture, where cars moved slowly and people frequently crossed the street wherever they wanted.
That shocked me. I had lived in this town for four years, and had never received a jaywalking ticket even though I jaywalked all the time. I couldn't recall any of the other college students I knew receiving a jaywalking ticket. But this 17-year-old Black teenager had already picked up two jaywalking tickets in his first couple of months?
There had been rumors that our mostly-White, middle-class college town had some racial animosity towards Black people. A major police incident involving a young Black man had occured two years earlier, and there was an idea that racial animosity was particularly prevalent among city officials and the police. There were strong suspicions of systematic racial profiling, but the local police department had refused to take racial statistics on officer stops. Until now it hadn't affected anyone I knew.
So I decided to run a test. I would purposely jaywalk across the biggest, busiest road in town at least 6 times every day for 6 months. I would make a concerted effort to violate the jaywalking laws as often as possible, to see if a 21-year-old White man could possibly pick up the same tickets that a 17-year-old Black man had picked up.
I embarked on this experiment, not fearing the consequences, because I was almost certain that I already knew what would happen.
Sure enough, six months and approximately 1500 jaywalking incidents later, I was still ticketless. I had jaywalked every day as often as I could without any policeman ever choosing to pull me over. I'm not certain how many times a cop saw me jaywalk, but there were 7 incidents where I "illegally" stepped out onto the road directly in front of an officer's car. In one incident the officer had to hit the brakes to avoid me. Yet not once did any officer even stop to talk to me or give me a warning. My jaywalking simply wasn't relevant to their police duties.
I reached the six month mark of my experiment confident that some laws didn't apply to me the same way they applied to other people. It wasn't a perfect experiment. I am certain that White people occasionally get ticketed for jaywalking in our community. But it seemed too much of a coincidence that one of the very few Black men I knew would get 2 tickets within a couple months of moving into the community, while I couldn't get a ticket in 6 months no matter how hard I tried to keep violating the same rules in the most outlandish manner. To this point in my life I have still never, ever been ticketed for jaywalking, despite the fact that I do a rather poor job of obeying the law in this regard.
The experiment stuck with me, and I as moved to a new community the next year, I experienced disparity in police treatment in a new environment.
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