Triage in the Slum

For a couple months now I've been planning to write a blog post about "triage" in our service in the slum.

There are so many needs here, and so few people trying to help address these needs.  There's only so much two of us can do.  So we have to make hard choices, right?

For example, in the reading program that I run, who should I teach?  Some people already have decent resources at home, so I'm not going to spend my time teaching them, when I could be teaching poorer kids.  Some people are simply too far behind or too mentally slow or have too many other issues, so I'm not going to spend all my energy working with just one of them, when I could teach five other kids in the same amount of time.  And some people are just beyond the kind of help that we're able to give...and we just have to let that go.

Or, at least, that's how the post was supposed to write itself.


But as I continued to immerse myself in life here, my heart refused to move in that direction.

"Triage" might sound like a good idea.  Cutting off the best and the worst to focus on a few in the middle who can be the "most effective" recipients of service sounds like a good intellectual strategy.

But it doesn't feel at all like love.  It doesn't feel like Jesus.  It doesn't feel conducive to the deeper messages we want to embody about why we're here and what we're doing with our lives and what we think about our community and who we believe really matters.

So yeah, three of the girls I teach are mentally disabled, and yeah, they all are making progress very slowly, and yeah, I could get multiple other kids through the program in the same amount of time I'm spending on one of them.  One of the three will probably never really learn to read on her own.  But they love the time they spend with me, and I'll keep spending time with them, and I don't need to predict what will come out of that.

And yeah, half-a-dozen kids who come to me have already had better schooling and already know how to read.  But they really want to sit down and read with me.  And I'll keep welcoming them in as long as they keep being excited to come.

And yeah, "those families" sure do look like they're beyond any help.  The collective of issues they face are nothing that little neighborly interactions are likely to have any impact on.  But Rose will still keep going and reading with their kids, and I'll keep getting involved in the family conflicts, and we'll keep doing what seems right to do when it seems right to do it, and if everyone else in the slum is surprised that we spend any time with them at all...well, isn't that part of the point?

And yeah, that baby I saw is probably going to die anyway, and I don't even live in that slum.  But once I saw it, I can't really pretend that I don't feel responsible for it.  So I'm going to keep trying to do all that feels appropriate and helpful to do, and even if the baby does die, then God knows it died despite the fact that I tried, and not because I didn't.

I don't have a good answer to our time constraints or the problem of massive needs to fill with so few human resources to meet them.  But I don't have a good alternative to continuing to offer love to every one of the people in front of me, to whatever degree I'm able.  Jesus wasn't able to heal every person in Israel.  But whatever his pre-determined decisions were about how he planned to spend his time, he rarely seemed to turn anyone away either. 

A bit on edge

I cringed as the motorcycle sped by us on the crowded street. The thought that went through my mind was, “If he crashes, I hope he does it out of sight where I don't have to get involved.”

That is one of the most foreign thoughts that could have entered my head. I've spent much of my life seeking incidents I could respond to and drawing up contingency plans in my mind for every possible situation.

I'm well aware of “secondary trauma”, but felt that I was unlikely to experience it. Though I'm an empathetic person, I have a lot of control over how much empathy I feel, and can move forward or back off depending on the situation. I'd need to step back every day to recharge, but that allowed me to dive back in when needed.

Or so I thought. The last three years has brought a stream of events that have stayed with me more than most, that have stuck in my heart and made me contemplate my own tinyness. There have been dozens of such incidents, including at least 15 deaths that I've been physically close to now since I moved here, but a few incidents in particular have adhered to my soul.

The drunk man who fell off the rickshaw and was knocked unconscious at the railway station, who I helped to revive and then helped get to a hospital.

My friend's father dying in my arms as I tried to save him in the home we shared.

My friend's uncle who I donated blood to in an emergency as he fought a critical case of dengue fever, seeing him recover from that trauma only to die of possibly related issues two months later.

The baby that died thirty minutes after Rose helped to deliver her.

The man in the motorcycle accident who I carried unconscious to the hospital, who lived.

The woman we passed on the way home from Nepal who had just died in a motorcycle accident.

The man who fell off the cliff in Thailand, for whom I was the attempted first responder and was unable to reach and save.

The accident between the ambulance and the truck in Bangladesh, for which I did not know whether to do something.

The man who got knocked unconscious on the road in Cambodia, for whom I did not know whether to do something

The last three in particular, which all happened during our recent trip out of the country, have occupied my mind during the last month. I'm a person who rushes into situations, tries to do what I can. And now I'm hesitant. The fact that they were all in countries that were somewhat foreign to me and which my language was limited and my knowledge of local resources nil, was a factor.  The fact that other people were already helping in the last two scenarios was also a factor.  But the fact that I wasn't sure what to do still hit me hard.  Sometimes I don't know if I can really help, and I'm afraid to be useless and see someone die yet again.

When I had that thought as the motorcycle passed, I realized that these traumatic situations were seriously affecting me. And I need to be careful, for the good of myself and my family and my neighbors, because I could be hurtful to my community if I'm not in a healthy place myself. I'm going to continue to work on processing what I've been through and what I've seen, how I've responded and how I can respond next time.

But I know that one option I don't have is to leave and get away from the trauma. Because living here has shown me that this trauma is here, whether I observe it or not. And if nothing else, my recent trips showed me that this same pain, these same early deaths and tragic ends, are happening all over on this continent, and certainly several others besides. I can work on forgiving myself and giving myself grace and living with the occasional guilt of not being able to respond some of the time, but I will be at a loss if I put myself in a situation where I won't even be here anymore and therefore won't be able to respond any of the time. And so here I stand, remaining in the gap, praying that as the next situation comes, and it will, that I won't be responding alone because there will be others around who have made the same choice.

One more story

A few years ago I was telling a friend about a suspicious police shooting that I had followed closely in my college years.  The shooting occurred in my college town, at a time when I was heavily involved with the Black community there, and so I kept up-to-date on the details of the case.

Basically, two police officers had shot and killed a young Black man during a traffic stop at night.  One cop claimed the man had pulled a gun and fired at them while they were conducting a search, and they fired on him in self-defense.  There were major issues with their story that made the case suspicious.

* The police rationale for stopping the man was dubious.  They claimed that they stopped him for speeding, but the ticket they wrote out was for "no registration".  However, the car was new and the registration was taped right to the car's window.  Why did they stop him, why did they ask if he was on probation and ask to search him, and why did they write out the ticket when he clearly had registration right there in the window?

* The motive didn't make sense.  The man was 18 years old, had no warrants, no violent record, no gang ties, no history of animosity towards the police.  He was a father returning home at night, had to go to work in the morning.  He had only one spot on his criminal record - a conviction for "carrying a concealed weapon" - brass knuckles in his glove compartment.  Why would he be carrying a gun illegally at night (especially being on probation for the brass knuckles charge), and why would he decide to kill two police officers, who had already run his information and called in the report (the second officer had come specifically as backup for the search)?

* The police officer claimed that the man fired at them first.  However, the gun recovered from the scene had not been fired.  This was the biggest issue with the case...how could the officers claim that the man had fired on them first when the gun recovered from him had not been fired?

* The gun recovered from the victim was a collector's item registered to a retired police chief.  There was no record of it having been sold or stolen.  The gun did not have any fingerprints on it, not even smudges.  This is the second huge red flag.  No one has ever shown how a retired police chief's weapon got into the hands of an 18-year-old Black man.

* Only one officer spoke to investigators.  The other officer pled the 5th and refused to speak.  Why did that officer plead the 5th when the other officer gave a description of events that would have clearly showed no wrongdoing at all?  Why wasn't he willing to give his side of the story to fellow police investigating him?

* There were many other minor points that showed inconsistencies in the "official" version of events.  Among them, an audio recording showed 15 shots fired, but only 14 shots had been fired from the officers' guns and only 14 shell casings were recovered from the scene.  What happened to the mystery shot?  What gun was it fired from? Why did investigators find gunpowder on Irvin Landrum if the gun they had supposedly recovered from him had not fired a shot? The officers' declarations in later testimony differed from their statements directly after the shooting - the officer who fired first changed his statement about whether he had actually seen the gun, changed his statement about who had fired first, and made a claim that the other officer had warned him about the gun when the other officer stated he had never said such a thing.


None of this is a clear smoking gun of manslaughter/murder.  But there are myriad worrisome issues.  No matter what happened, the fact that the officer claimed the man had fired first, when the man's gun had not been fired, is an issue.  No matter what happened, the fact that a gun registered to an officer had ended up on the scene without anyone being able to explain how is an issue.  No matter what happened, the fact that one officer pled the 5th in an officer-involved shooting, but was eventually allowed to return to duty, is an issue.


The behavior by city officials afterwards just added to the anger surrounding the case.  During the aftermath, the following issues emerged.

* Police went to the home of the man's girlfriend (and mother of his two children) to elicit any testimony that could be used as evidence against him.  They did not inform her about the shooting or his death until after they had tried to draw out as much circumstantial evidence against him as they could from her.

* The local sheriff handled the "outside investigation" of the shooting.  Many protesters thought that the local sheriff was too close to the police department to be a truly independent investigator.

* In the initial report, the city said that the gun found had been registered to "a collector", and that it was unknown how it got into the man's possession.  Months later that the city was forced to admit that the "collector" in question was actually a police officer, in fact a former chief.  The city claimed that they had blotted out the police officer's name and failed to disclose his profession because he "wasn't really involved in the case".

* Throughout the case, the city used underhanded methods to taint the credibility of the victim and his family.  They released a report stating that the victim had a previous conviction for "carrying a concealed weapon", without mentioning that the weapon had been brass knuckles, not a gun.  When the man's uncle started leading weekly protests against the city, the city released the uncle's criminal record to newspapers (he had a conviction for armed robbery from back in the 1970s).  That arrest had nothing to do with the case and was  pure retaliation.  The city also hired private investigators to look into the backgrounds of other protesters.

* At the end of the year, the city awarded the two officers with their "Employee of the Year" awards, which included a $1,000 financial prize.  Since the men had not yet returned to duty, the sole action for which they were being rewarded was the shooting of the Black teenager.

* Both officers were eventually allowed to return to duty, even though one officer had pled the 5th and never told his supervisors or the outside investigators what had actually happened.

* The City settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the family for $450,000 without admitting guilt of any kind.


I was well aware of these facts as they occurred, and it upset me a lot.  I stayed focused on the case for more than a year.  However, my focus faded as I moved away from the community.

Until that moment seven years later when I looked up the case for a friend.  I looked up an article about the shooting for him and saw the names of the officers.  And then I realized that one of the involved officers had become a friend of mine.

I hadn't known the officer when I was following the case and am generally bad with names, so his name had hadn't stuck with me.  When I first met him a couple years later, I didn't make the connection.  I knew this new friend had been a police officer, and that he had recently left the force, but we never talked about his previous job.  He was a soft-spoken, polite, kind guy, who looked up to me in a sense and constantly praised the things I was doing in my life.  He was the kind of person you have a hard time imagining as a police officer, figuring that he must have focused on community relations or something.  You couldn't imagine him using force of any kind.  Over the next five years as we got to know each other and our friendship grew, his time on the police force just didn't come up.

So I sat there stunned, seeing his name on the computer screen.  This was the first major police case I'd ever known about, my prototype of a suspicious police shooting.  And my nice, soft-spoken, kind-hearted friend was the man who had fired first.

My mind spun.  I didn't know what to think.  I couldn't believe that I'd never heard about it, never been told about it.  From carefully talking around the issue with a number of mutual friends, I found that none of them had known about it either. As far as I could tell, no one at church had ever spoken about it in any context.  How did this stay such a big secret?  Could my police officer friend tell me what really happened?  Did the fact that a guy like him had been involved make me want to rethink the case?  I spent my time reading through all the evidence, all the reports, all the protester arguments against the official reports.  I did that at least three times without getting clarity.


Some friends who have read my accounts have felt that I've been overly focused on the side of the victim.  They feel that I have not given the police officers a fair hearing.  And it is certainly true that it is the victims' side of the story that I have wanted to tell.  But I have known a lot of officers in a number of contexts, and it adds a humanity and uncertainty to how I view many of these cases.  As I said earlier, a close relative of mine was a career officer.  Two friends from childhood became officers.  I got to know one former officer quite well as we went to graduate school together, another from church, and partnered with several others in various work capacities through the schools I taught at and a charity I was involved in.  Most intensely, I spent a year working in a jail side-by-side with sheriff's deputies five days a week.

Knowing officers had added depth to my thoughts about these cases.  That can go both ways.  It can make me wonder whether soft-hearted people I know could be capable of malicious intent.  But I've also been able to hear good cops tell me first-hand stories of why they had beaten suspects who didn't need to be beaten, solely due to the stress that they had been under.  The more I've learned about how many modern police forces operate and been able to meet the people who have been working under them, the more I've been able to believe that good people, even cops, can be capable of some really bad things.


This is my last post in this series.  I wanted to share my own context for these issues because the cause is both personal and global to me.  Today's news stories are about the recent tragedies of Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, John Crawford III, Eric Courtney Harris, Anthony Hill, Eric Garner, Sureshbhai Patel, William Chapman, Kajiemi Powell, Akai Gurley, Yvette Smith, Timothy Russell, Melissa Williams, Michael Brown, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Charly "Africa" Leundeu Keunang, Rumain Brisbon, and dozens of others just in this past year.  They're also about those who faced the things back before it became the public issue - Kalief Browder, Darren Rainey, Karil Denyakin, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Trent Benefield, Joseph Guzman, Robbie Tolan, Leroy Grant, Rayshawn Brown, Danny Reyes, Oscar Grant, Alexandra Torrensvilas, Douglas Dendinger, Jonathan Ferrell, Larry Jackson, Reynaldo Cuevas, Rekia Boyd, Wendell Allen, and hundreds of others.  But it's also about the thousands of incidents every single day that never get reported, and the regular people we interact with in our daily lives who never make the news.

I also wanted to share my personal experience because 95% of what I've experienced has occurred during the short period in my life in which I was deeply involved with the Black community.  Those who condemn the citizens of Ferguson without having read the whole report, who critique the riots in Baltimore without knowing the history between police and residents there, who watch video of teens running in McKinney without knowing what segregation has meant in that town's recent history - or even the positive connotations it holds for some White people there today, do so without a real understanding of the difference between interacting with police from a privileged perspective and interacting with police as a Black person in a Black community.

Illicit police-citizen conflict is not merely a racial issue.  The victims and perpetrators both can come from any racial background.  But due to the manner in which Black communities are policed, it is an issue that far and away disproportionately affects the Black population.  And that has negative repercussions that extend far beyond the immediate victims themselves.  Poor policing discourages a community, prevents citizens from seeking the police for help, exacerbates crime.  Fathers and mothers and caretakers who are unjustly shot or unjustly imprisoned leave orphans back in their communities, leading to more crime, leading to more death and imprisonment, and feeding into a cycle that only gets worse.

A look at the comments section on any mainstream or conservative media source will reveal hundreds of comments of the type, "But look at how many Black people are in jail!  Look at how many minorities are arrested!  When are we going to accept that it's all their fault!"

Until we've addressed the real systematic issues that have led to those communities being where they are today, and that help contribute to so many people from those communities ending up dead or in jail, we haven't accepted that it is indeed partially our own fault.

Race matters

My roommate Ian walked out our front door into South Central.  He was an Americorps volunteer, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and carrying nothing.

The police car pulled up as he was walking across our front lawn.  "Get on the ground!"

Ian looked at the officer incredulously and started to get down.  He questioned what was going on since he hadn't done anything.

"We saw you throw something on the ground.  Get down!"

Ian laid down on the ground on his stomach.  The police came over, handcuffed him, and searched him.  "What did you throw down?"

Ian replied, "I didn't throw anything down.  I didn't have anything in my hand at all."

After failing to find anything, the police questioned what he was doing in the area, then uncuffed and released him.

Ian wasn't carrying anything, wasn't doing anything suspicious, was walking on his own front lawn.  Do police ever handcuff you when you're just walking in your front yard?  I have little doubt that the police harassed Ian because he was White, and he was a neighborhood where they didn't expect to see White people.



Two years earlier, I had walked out of my home in Inglewood to drive to the store.  As I left my house I saw a police car approaching.  My immediate thought was, "Great, now they're probably going to hassle me."  I buckled my seatbelt before starting the car, pulled out carefully, followed the traffic laws to a T.  It didn't matter.  One block away the cop car turned its lights on and pulled me over.

I tried to speak to the officer when he came up to my door, but didn't get the chance.  Before I could say anything, he yelled at me, "Get out of the car."

I opened the door to get out, and once the door opened he reached in and pulled me out by the arm.  He put me up against the side of the car and searched me.  The other officer who was with him asked if he could search the car, and I let him, since I obviously had nothing there.

"Where are you from?" the officer who had searched me asked.

"You saw me," I told him.  "That apartment I just walked out of."

"No, where are you from," he demanded.

"That is my home, that's where I live," I replied defiantly, with emphasis.

"What do you do?" the officer asked with more hesitation.

"I'm a school teacher.  I teach at a school right here," I threw in his face.

"You fit the description of someone we were looking for," the officers claimed as they let me go.

"Yeah, right, I'm sure you're getting all sorts of calls about nicely dressed 6'1" young White men in the heart of Inglewood today," I thought as I continued on to my destination.  Once again, I'm certain that I was stopped not because of any actual evidence of wrongdoing, but because the color of my skin didn't fit who they thought should be around that neighborhood.



Those aren't the only stories like that.  In another neighborhood in inner LA I was stopped twice while walking on the sidewalk, told to hold my arms above my head and spread my legs out, and searched right there on the street.  The policeman was almost shocked when I told him I was an Inglewood resident.  "Really?" I still remember him asking incredulously.  "Really?" he repeated.

Racial profiling is illegal.  It violates the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection under the law.  It violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure.  It pisses people off.  It alienates entire communities from the police.  And yet it keeps happening all the time.

Now, when I tell stories of White people getting profiled in Black neighborhoods, the story sounds a little funny.  It isn't the biggest inconvenience in the world.  But that's because I, as a White man, am only racially profiled when I'm in Black neighborhoods, a place White people rarely tread.  Black people, on the other hand, are racially profiled in their own Black neighborhoods AND in White neighborhoods, in middle-class suburbs and wealthy business districts, on the roads, on the sidewalks, and in front of their own schools.  That's their experience nearly everywhere they go.

It's the experience of Los Angeles film producer Charles Belk, arrested in Beverly Hills and detained by police for 6 hours because he "matched the description" of a robbery, despite having an obvious alibi and not looking anything like the actual robber, whose face was recorded on video.  New York City college student Trayvon Christian, detained by police because he had bought a belt at Barney's.  Aspiring music video producer Joshua Rivers, who had $16,000 stolen from him by DEA agents and his dreams ruined because he "fit the profile" of a drug trafficker.  Yale college student Charles Blow, held up at gunpoint because he "fit the description" of a suspect.   Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., reported to police by neighbors for getting into his own home and then arrested inside for supposedly "disturbing the peace" when questioning the officer.  Retired Major League Baseball player Doug Blanville, told by an officer to explain his presence in his own driveway in Hartford.  Current NBA player Thabo Sefolosha, who was followed by police, knocked to the ground, and had his leg broken when he was on the sidewalk after police officers responded to an unrelated stabbing at a club.  New Guinean immigrant Amadou Dillo, shot 41 times by police after an unexplained stop because police thought his wallet was a gun. Former Hall of Fame Laker and businessman Jamaal Wilkes, stopped and handcuffed by police while driving his Trans Am because his license tag was "about to expire".  University of Wisconsin law professor Calvin Warren, stopped and questioned by campus police because he had a goatee.  And on and on and on, hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people across America.

It's the experience of the Black people of Ferguson and the Black and Latino people of New York City and the Black people in Iowa and minorities in possibly every state in America.

And we wonder why Black people in many communities don't trust the police.  We wonder why, when seeing the universal issues of excessive force and constitutional violations and other problems that I've detailed in previous entries, the pain seems to fall primarily on people of color.


I want to tell one more story that is very personal for me.  One day I was sitting at the kitchen table with an intimate family member, whose husband had been a career officer and the chief of police for a small California town.  The conversation turned to her late husband, and for some reason she started talking about the negative relationship he had had with a Black resident in the town.  "That guy Leroy was always causing trouble, always accusing us of racism.  But we weren't racist towards Black people.  We were racist towards Mexicans though.  They were dirty, always hanging around not doing any work."

I listened stunned, stunned that he had been a racist police chief and stunned that she had admitted it.  I wonder how many other times these conversations happen at family dinner tables around America, how many other times the secrets heard are kept in silence, how many people have suffered due to the racial suspicions of those who operate with the force of law.

I wonder how much longer it will go on, and what it will take to change.

Just a little too much

During the years I lived in Inglewood, I got little glimpses of the community-police dynamic.  It was not pretty.

One of the first memories of my time there was when I walked home from school to get lunch at my apartment.  While I was sitting at my computer eating a burrito, a major police action occurred across the street.  Apparently some robbers had ran from police and were in hiding.  The police surrounded the block, a guy with a shotgun standing every 40 feet or so.  I was amazed.  Police cars rolling around, guns being brandished everywhere, helicopters overhead.  I had never seen anything like it.

The shotguns looked like they were just being used as tools of intimidation.  Which, of course, they were.

Massive displays of force like that were common.  I had students tell me stories of their homes getting raided, police breaking down doors, charging in with guns drawn, scaring their family.  Sometimes it was the case of mistaken identity, or the police claimed they had the right home but failed to find anything in it.

Once it happened to me.  I went to my school on a Saturday, as I did every week, to water the class garden and take care of the classroom animals.  Since I only had my classroom key and not a front gate key, I jumped the gate like I did every week (which my principal was well aware of).  Except this week someone called the cops.

I didn't know anything was happening until I saw multiple police cars pull up into the school's back parking lot.  I thought, "Whoa, must be something big going on across the street."  Then I saw the police get out of their car and start gesturing towards me.  Wait, no, they were gesturing behind me.  I turned around and saw that multiple police cars had pulled into the front parking lot, and a gang of police officers had their guns drawn.

I walked over to them.

They asked me what I was doing.

I said that I was a teacher watering the plants.  I showed them the water can I was holding in my hand.

They put the guns away, apologized, blamed the caller, left.

(I should note that I got off a lot easier than the four Black parole officers who had guns pulled on them in a similar error.)

Our neighborhood was a scary place.  I knew multiple kids who got shot - it seemed to happen to someone at our school about once a year.  Once I drove down the street with one of my kids in the car, and he pointed out homes where friends of his had died, places where people he had known had been shot.  There was a shooting in front of our own house at least 4, possibly 5 times in the 4.5 years I lived there.

But I never saw how the dramatically violent police presence made the neighborhood safer, or reduced the likelihood that someone would die a violent death.  In fact, I think it made the neighborhood more dangerous.  And it wasn't just the people who were shot by Inglewood PD that I'm referring to here.  For everyone in Inglewood, the police were scary.  It made things tense.  It made people not want to call police in dangerous situations, not knowing what might happen.  And subconsciously it confirmed the belief that violence and force were the proper arbitrators of dispute, the go-to means of asserting one's own rights and power.

In America, I generally don't believe that we live in a "police state".  But some of our poorest neighborhoods are living in something close to one, and a lot of other neighborhoods have been moving in that direction in recent years.  Military gear, even armored vehicles, have been flowing into communities.  Images of police officers pointing sniper rifles at unarmed civilians or yelling threats at protesters, (even murderous ones) are the new normal.

Do neighborhoods with militarized police forces breed calmer, safer, more peace-loving citizens?  Does intimidation work as a technique for improving the life of a community?  I really doubt it.  But it appears to be the road that many community police forces have chosen to walk right now.  We only need to look at neighborhoods like Inglewood and others like it to see how well it's been working so far.

Beaten Community

The year after my jaywalking experiment, I moved to Inglewood to take a job teaching young people.  I entered a community that was riled up.

The month before I moved in, at a gas station just down the street, a man had videotaped a police officer beating up a teenage boy in handcuffs.

The videotape shows an officer picking up the boy from behind, who appears limp, and then slamming him against the hood of his patrol car.  He then turns the boy around and punches the boy in the face with a closed fist.

The boy was Donovan Jackson, a special-education student at the local high school.  He had been diagnosed with an auditory processing delay, which meant that it was difficult for him to follow verbal instructions.

Donovan had ridden to the gas station with his dad, then went inside the station to buy a bag of chips.   Police officer Carlos Lopez saw that the parked car's license plate tags were expired and approached Donovan's father, where he proceeded to find that his driver's license was suspended.  Officer Lopez was arresting Donovan's father when Donovan returned with his chips.  (Donovan's father, who was never accused of resisting, suffered injured ribs in the arrest.)

Officer Lopez yelled instructions at Donovan, who didn't respond and just stood in place looking at his father being arrested.  The officer finished arresting Donovan's dad and then attempted to force Donovan into the police car.  Officer Lopez claims that Donovan swung at him.  Two more officers arrived at this moment, having been called by Officer Lopez to provide backup to the arrest.  These officers, Jeremy Morse and Bijan Darvish, grabbed Donovan by the arms and forced him to the ground.  As he fell to the ground, Donovan, who was much smaller than the officers arresting him, flailed his arms, grabbing at Officer Morse's shirt and leaving a scratch on his face.  Officer Davish claims that Donovan also grabbed his uniform.  Officer Darvish then punched Donovan twice in the face.  Two more officers arrived at the scene (5 officers total now for a suspended licence!), one of them, Officer Antoine Crook, hitting Donovan with a flashlight in the process, and they handcuffed the teenager.  Donovan claims that the officers dragged him around the ground by the chain he wore on his neck, and that he was unable to breathe and nearly unconscious by the time he was handcuffed.

Several observers were screaming at the police to stop beating the teenager, which attracted a crowd.  One of them, Mitchell Crooks, heard the noise and grabbed a camcorder to began videotaping the beating he was observing.  At the start of the videotape, you can see Officer Morse pull the handcuffed Donovan up to his feet, who is not moving and appears limp, and then slam him face-first against the hood of his police car.

Officer Morse claims that at this point Donovan grabs his testicles, though that is not apparent on the video tape.  Officer Morse then held Donovan's neck with his left hand and punched Donovan in the face with his right hand.  He then appears to start choking Donovan, at which point the other officers intervene, one of them physically pulling Officer Morse off of Donovan.

It turned out that this was not an isolated incident.  A local woman claimed that Officer Morse had assaulted her earlier in the year.  The LA Times reported more than a dozen abuse-of-force incidents that the Inglewood Police Department had been involved in in recent years, often resulting in broken noses and teeth getting knocked out.  Many of the cases involved people who had not committed any crime, but were accused of police of "interfering with police business" or "contempt of cop".  Several of the people beaten by Inglewood police officers were local schoolteachers.

Officer Morse, who was videotaped slamming the handcuffed Donovan against the car and punching him in the face, was fired.

Officer Darvish, Morse's partner who later admitted punching Donovan in the face twice (not on tape), was suspended 10 days for filing a false incident report which failed to acknowledge any of the beating.  He continued to work as an officer in good standing with the Inglewood PD.

Officer Crook, who admitted hitting Donovan with a flashlight (not on tape), was suspended 4 days and lost his job as an officer, being reassigned as a civilian jailer.

Mitchell Crooks, the man who videotaped the incident, was tracked down by police and arrested a week later by officers on a 3-year-old warrant for misdemeanor DUI and hit-and-run.  Though he had previously been stopped by police several times for jaywalking and traffic violations, this was the first time that he was arrested, extradited back to Placer County, and forced to face charges.


When the courts got involved, it really got interesting.

Officer Morse, represented by elite lawyers who moved the trial to Torrance (a middle-class community miles from Inglewood) and whittled down the jury pool down to a single Black juror, managed to get a hung jury (7 in favor of conviction, 5 against) in his criminal trial.  Officer Morse was never convicted of any crime, despite the clear video evidence and testimony of other officers.  In a civil case, Officer Morse sued the City of Inglewood for firing him and claimed anti-White racial discrimination, because Officer Crook wasn't fired.  He won his lawsuit and was awarded $1.6 million.

Officer Darvish was found not guilty of filing a false report.  He also sued the city, like Officer Morse claiming that his 10-day suspension was the result of anti-White racial discrimination.  He also won and was awarded $810,000.  He still works as an officer.

Officer Crook and one other officer were granted immunity for their grand jury testimony against Officer Morse.

Donovan Jackson's family sued the City of Inglewood and the Inglewood PD in Federal Court for violations of Donovan's civil rights.  They settled out-of-court for an undisclosed amount.

Mitchell Crooks, the witness who videotaped the beating, served 7 months in jail for his arrest on the unrelated charges.

The City of Inglewood later sued its own lawyers for losing so many cases so badly.



This was the Inglewood neighborhood that I walked into.  From this high-profile case, citizens learned (or had confirmed), that:

* The police, who had been beating them for years, could continue to get away with it even if they got caught on videotape.

* Police officers are privileged enough that even when doing something wrong, they can still come out on top.

* Doing the right thing and going to the police with evidence might not be in your own best interest.

* The City of Inglewood is completely incompetent in all matters.



The problems with police brutality in Inglewood did not end.  In 2008, the LA Times published yet another report on excessive force by the Inglewood PD, including 11 lethal killings of citizens in 5 years, half of which were unarmed.  One especially egregious case involved a mentally ill man who repeatedly asked officers if he could pull up his slipping pants, then was shot and killed when he reached to pull them up.   Another involved a man shot in the back who had run away when officers stopped him for riding his bike on the sidewalk.  In 2010, the US Justice Department found significant flaws in how the Inglewood PD handled use-of-force incidents.  Unfortunately, excessive force in the Inglewood PD continues to this day.

Jaywalking for the police

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.

What I do, What I have, What people say about me...is not who I am

A little clarification, with some caveats.

What exactly have you been doing there?

Primarily, I've been trying to learn the local languages, learn how to live daily life in the slum and be a good example to others as I do so, and teach illiterate children how to read in Hindi.  I'm also supporting my wife in her programs with women in the basti and teenage victims of human trafficking.  Here and there I've been non-violently intervening in fights between men and beatings of women and children, helping an over-achieving slum resident get into college and succeed there, and trying to be a good example of a man by doing household work, speaking appropriately about women, and defending the weak. Outside of the slum I've been serving on the board of a city-wide (soon to be international) literacy program and trying to help them improve the program, teaching Christians in the city and beyond about the kingdom of God, and trying to help people like me live here in the city. Internationally I'm supporting other people in living this same kind of life among the poor, promoting a more sustainable relationship between people and the environment, and lending assistance to scientific research in India, Bangladesh, and America.

But I am not what I do.


How do you live? Like, what do you have?

My wife and I rent an upstairs room from a large family in the slum. It's a little 8ft by 9ft brick room with a tarp and bamboo roof. A little water gets in through the sides but the roof doesn't leak at all. Our appliances are a gas stove, a ceramic water filter, a light bulb and a fan. We sleep on a foam mattress on the ground under a mosquito net. Our latrine is outside in the shared space with the family, but we are the ones who primarily use it when the next-door room is unoccupied (there's another latrine downstairs). We carry our water upstairs in buckets that we fill at a downstairs tap. Most of our other possessions are quite simple, but I do have a mobile phone, a camera, and a laptop. My wife also has a bicycle.

But I am not what I have.


What do the people say about you?

Initially some people were saying that maybe I was working for the CIA, or that I was a criminal on the run. (They didn't tell me that directly, but I found out through the grapevine.) Generally most people seem to have come to know that we are here to live with and serve among normal people, and they are respectful of that.  They share it enough that people I've never met before sometimes know my name and what I'm doing here.  Our primary mode is “guest”, and we are treated extremely hospitably by many many people. Some people consider us saints, or infidels, or crazy for having left a place like America. Some people have said that I must be pretty stupid because I can't speak Hindi correctly or even know how to do basic household work the right way. I think some people think that I'm a little shy, and others might think I'm lazy because I don't have a “normal” job yet, but I haven't heard people actually share that. At least one person says that I'm their best friend.

Outside of the slum, some people say that I'm a role model, a heretic, idealistic, unrealistic, a jerk, a hero, inappropriate, too negative a person, too optimistic a person, a confused liberal, a brainwashed conservative, impatient, loud, aggressive.

But I am not what people say about me.

So what am I then? At the most important core, I identify as a child of God and a disciple of Christ.

I am a child of God before I am anything else.

My personality at the root is that of an idealist (a “1” on the Enneagram if you like that sort of thing). I am a person in process, with a lot of faults and a long way to go. But a child of God, and already loved by God just the way I am.

No matter what I do, what I have, or what people say about me.


This post inspired by Henri Nouwen's following talk, and the fact that those three questions are the exact three questions that people from the outside always ask me about my life here.

12:42am

At times I wonder

if I die tomorrow

Would it have mattered that I was here?

Two years of faltering

trying

Bearing witness

coming up short

I returned from India in 2004

Watched Hotel Rwanda

Cried for two hours

Why did we do nothing!!@!@

They were dying

Slaughtered

Suffering

And we sat here, doing nothing

That moment the roots entwined with the bedrock

God had planted a seed six years earlier

a Mark 8 bible study and a word just for me

He watered it with every year of faith

Fed it in Inglewood

Pruned it into a vision in India

but it was that moment, watching that movie, that the roots grabbed bedrock that they could never let go

I will not sit here while they die there

even if all I can do is stand in front of a machete and say NO!

become one more life cut down

I will do it

in the hope that my life given, my “No” voiced, would inspire one more crack in the dam

one more witness

one more NO!

Because Jesus didn't stand in the gap, refuse to strike, love the other, impale on a cross

so we could sit here in a backed-up reservoir of “God's provision”

while billions suffer in a dried out desert below

begging for the scraps that fall off of our table.

[Face contorted. Sob into my mat. Choking on it]

I want.

To crack.
This dam.

I would die for that.

And when I set my hand to that plow

I never, ever thought of turning back.

But an outcome I never considered

What if

[Sobs again. Mouth open. Shoulders wracked. Get my head under the mat. Dont wake them up. Don't let them hear.]

What if I got here

stood in front of the machete

and its wielder, the true enemy, just smiled and passed me by

What if I didn't die?

and they still did.

The father. The uncle. The teenager. The neighbor. The baby.

and I did nothing

nothing that made a difference

And they still died.

I know that if I am faithful for ten years, it will make a difference

in a life. or a thousand. or ten

but what if I die tomorrow?

what if I don't get ten years?

do I know how long I have to watch them die around me?

my little crack in the dam

dries up before the water can even reach the ground

and no one looks to make any more cracks

This is reality

we are here

We are here.

God is Faithful.

We are here.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

I might die tomorrow

and I know that's not the worst thing that can happen

because I already see worse now

The text read “baby died”

And there was nothing I could have done

nothing I could do

so tonight I cry

Four news stories that make me sad

I was away for a few weeks, and am only slowly getting reintegrated back into life here.  So instead of talking about my community, I'm going to briefly mention four news articles that made me really sad this past few weeks:

Family-friendly tours of Bangkok's sex bars, with CNN doing their advertising for free

This article was written with a glibness that made me ill.

At another bar, both sons were lured on stage where two nude women spanked them with paddles made of harmless sponge, while the crowded bar's patrons roared with delight.
"My sons have absolutely come of age," marveled the 52-year-old father, Phil. "Because they're slightly reserved, the guys. Anything like this, they're not used to. They've grown up.

Leaked files show the Iraq War was even worse than we thought

There were already more than enough reasons to be against the Iraq War, including, of course, the lies that were told to lead us into it, the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed, the millions of people whose lives were traumatized, the enormous cost in broken lives to our own families, and the terrible state that the country was left in.  So it's just yet another depressing moment to find out that the US government was logging tens of thousands of civilian casualties while publicly claiming that they had no such logs.  The leaks also reveal that the government routinely ignored reports of rape, torture, abuse and murder, instead just passing the reports onto the very units responsible for the abuse.  In response to the report, the Pentagon only said that the leaks are terrible because they might give away US military tactics.  And then there's this:

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.
The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

And another thing about that war

It looks like the mercenaries (I mean, "heavily armed civilian contractors who shoot people") we hired for that same war were more out of control than was ever let on to the public.

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

May God avenge their blood...but just case he doesn't, we already have

And, because the world constantly forgets how horribly war always goes for everyone involved, it looks quite possible that another one is about to start.  Three Jewish youths are tragically murdered, so a Muslim youth is gruesomely tortured and murdered in response, and the violence appears to continue to escalate.  Netanyahu, taking every opportunity to villainize and dehumanize the other side, claims:

"They sanctify death, we sanctify life.  They sanctify cruelty, and we mercy and compassion. That is the secret of our strength."

As he said that, hundreds of Palestinians were being arrested, 12 had been killed, Israeli soldiers had been filmed viciously beating Palestinian youth, and dozens of homes and businesses had been destroyed (this is in addition to the 25 Palestinians killed and hundreds injured in the partially related fighting in Gaza).  This is a repeat of the pattern that has existed since 2006, where 10-20 Palestinians are killed for every Israeli who is killed.  And, of course, Palestinian terror groups have been firing rockets as Israel in response.  Can neither side see that their violence only leads to more violence?  Or are they actually looking for violence, and are glad when their enemies respond just the way they want them too?


May the God of Peace turn our hearts to the peace that his son preached, and lead us to a different way of living in this world.