Finding Pride in this Movement
After seeing countless videos of the NYPD beating protestors with batons, arresting essential workers, and the recent killing of Jamel Floyd, a Black federal inmate who was maced to death in his New York City cell, I have finally lost my pride — in my city, my country and somewhat, myself. As the #BlackLivesMatter protests have grown from an impassioned response to the senseless killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis to spread even beyond all 50 states, what is happening in NYC is not a microcosm, but a mirror, reflecting the thousands of stories being shared of the injustice, failures, and indiscretions of our law enforcement for generations throughout this country.
I have been hesitant to share my personal experience with New York’s Finest from when I needed their help the most, while also grappling with how we ignored a vast history of systemic racism (of which I actively partook) and the acknowledgment of a pollution of within our police force that led to this nationally unifying moment of truth.
If you don’t know me all too well, I identity as a pansexual man — if you think you know me but were unaware of this distinction, it’s because I was most likely frightened to how you would respond, so take that as you will. A privilege nonetheless for, unlike the color of one’s skin, I had the agency to decide when to disclose my existence to those who I did not feel safe within their presence. I will never in my life fully understand what it’s like to be a person of color, especially that of a Black male, but I have witnessed firsthand how a similar pervasive bigotry that led me to require the services of the NYPD was already instilled within their culture.
2 years this Pride month, I was a victim of a hate crime where I was physically assaulted in a bar in the East Village of New York City. This bar was equipped with 2 cameras and, while it was a predominantly straight bar, It was the night before the Pride Parade and the place was packed with witnesses. Three of which spoke to the police following the incident. I was bleeding, bruised, angry, concussed and confused and two nearby NYPD officers arrived to find me outside in tears, screaming, after both I and my attackers had been removed from the bar. When I was brought to the station, one officer had the audacity to say “maybe you shouldn’t have dressed like that”. Now, if you’re familiar with the Stonewall riots of 1969 that sparked Pride as it is today, the police do not have a comfortable history with the LGBTQ+ community in NYC. Even then, I was wearing white pants and a white shirt of the band Queen — a band famously revered by queers and straights alike. This statement was the first instance where I felt deep within my heart, even in my brainwashed stupor, I was already being left out of their commitment to justice.
When the police finally gathered the footage from the bar, it was requested I be brought into the station to review it with the detective assigned to my case. I was on medical leave from work and still heavily concussed at this point with an untreated broken nose and, when I entered the station, I then had to relive my trauma from the weekend prior. The footage of 2 grown men, both a head taller than me, beating me like a rag doll on a dance floor in front of a crowd of onlookers. The detective proceeded to gaslight me, stating that perhaps I shouldn’t have provoked them, having to stomach his response through my tears, as I reiterated that one of the men had repeatedly been sticking his fingers in the rear crease of my jeans and calling me a “faggot”, which one of the witnesses outside the bar had corroborated. This is one week after arriving at work on said Monday having trouble forming sentences — I felt broken. I could not comprehend how a detective had discounted a very real moment in which I not only felt devalued as a human being but had feared for my life. I followed up 2 more times before the detective called me 3 weeks later saying they were closing the investigation. In retrospect, I should’ve consulted a lawyer, but my brain was still recovering and was in no mental state to make those decisions for myself. For the next 2 months, I did not leave the walls of my apartment.
Our movement today is really about two separate yet intertwined systemic issues: institutional racism and the dehumanization of Black people in this country, as well as a culture of vastly undertrained, over-budgeted, yet entitled police officers who have exploited said dehumanization without consequence. when said exploitation or undertraining fails to live up to the standards of justice they’re tasked to uphold, they are repeatedly vindicated — this reinforces habits that become a destructive culture of force and indifference.
In my case, I am a white male who was failed by the NYPD due to their undertraining and indifference. Cops know to protect and serve, but even the good ones only receive 110 hours of training and don’t receive any formal sensitivity training into how trauma, fear, or anxiety affects mental health. One of a myriad of systemic reasons why 80% of rapes or sexual assaults go completely unreported to the police. Of those 110 hours of training, officers only receive 8 hours of mediation and conflict management — as evidenced by the bounty of videos you’ve probably seen amongst these non-violent protests. Now, this only acknowledges one of those separate yet intertwined issues discussed above. Systemic racism is another beast in and of itself.
When I ponder where we are today, I think about the feckless defenses of racism that were thrown around shortly before the election in 2016 where the justification for racism became a war of words to drown out the very real, tangible bodies of Black men laying cold on the concrete yet hotly vilified as thugs on the nightly news. It was 3 years since Trayvon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement really only saw national support from within an exhausted Black Community. Perhaps the dumbest of those arguments was around that of former 49ers Quarterback Colin Kaepernick who was suing the NFL alleging they fired him for his peaceful and nonviolent protests before the game clock ever started.
Where self-proclaimed “woke” people — myself included — failed most in their defense of Colin Kaepernick kneeling before the playing of our National Anthem was by directly responding to the feigned criticism that his nonconfrontational display was somehow offensive to the military. The defense at the time, and still justifiably is today, being that Blacks have fought alongside Whites in every war since the Revolution. Then slaves, of course, where they fought alongside our Founding Fathers to free their own masters from the tyranny of the British with the promise of their own freedom (we, of course, know they would then die in shackled servitude on their newly “freed” masters’ plantations).
The most American defense of Colin Kaepernick’s free speech is that, just as the song says, this is the “Land of the Free”. However, the real truth about Kaepernick‘s protest that is so prescient to today, is perhaps the real defense we should’ve given of the man kneeling before the national anthem was in front of us the whole time — That song — written by a man named Francis Scott Key, who was a slaveowner.
We are in a Russian nesting doll of crises at the moment — a culture of racism within a police state within a recession within a global pandemic. The United States has lost 110,000 lives in a matter of months, 40 million out of work, and no sports, concerts, or social engagements to distract us from our own mortality — and also, our privilege. The true irony of our “Land of Free” is that we are, in fact, living through a crisis where our socially-distant solitary confinement actually exposed Americans to the fact that some people in this land — Black Americans — have no, if not limited, freedoms. Everyone knows there are disproportionately more Black people in prisons than white people — we convinced ourselves that somehow a population that made up only 13% of our national demographic made their way into those cells through our very normal and very non-biased justice system. To be honest, all of us — every last one of us — knew it was biased. But it just wasn’t our (White America’s) problem to deal with. Someone else will come along to take care of it.
However, all Americans were and are existing within the structures of that police state, not just Black people — but the privilege applied to White Americans means they have no problem sneaking past the guards. We the people of a free country were all living within a system that also freely allowed our separate yet behaviorally monolithic police forces not only to choose when a crime is to be committed by a Black person but also to choose the punishment right there on the pavement. Like a hamster in a cage, Whites witnessed and were entertained by the cultural products of Black Americans spinning on a wheel from the safety outside of those wired bars only to effortlessly look away when a blue-suited bully felt it was their time to tear them out and squeeze them until they stopped breathing.
Thanks to the camera phone, our system of oppression became so largely infested with racial violence at the hands of law enforcement, the swarm of indecency became so bloated it could hide no longer. While we may very well have good cops, the fraternal culture of the great Blue Wall of Silence that has pervaded our precincts discourages these good cops from calling out bad cops for being bad cops. Even a bad cop with a GED understands the ramifications of the bystander effect — let alone a bad, racist cop, with only 110 hours of training, a gun, and the federal guarantee of a protective doctrine called qualified immunity.
So what do you do when Americans are already living with shackles before they ever cross an undertrained, systematically-biased police officer? Abolition. There’s a lot that needs to be abolished — if not, at least something. we must abolish the protections of qualified immunity that refuses a victim to sue a government official (like an officer of the law) for committing murder to hold true justice accountable. We must abolish the belief that the beating of peaceful protestors violating an 8 PM curfew is acceptable. We must abolish the mindset that White Privilege is a hoax. We must abolish the disease of racism in our country that refuses to acknowledge that blacks are not equal in this country and that bigotry laid the bricks of the buildings and statues too many have mourned far greater than they mourned for Justin Taylor just this last Sunday, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others before them.
We must abolish a system where our own citizens fear the very men and women clad with rifles and military-grade riot gear that were sworn to protect them, and we have no other rightful choice but to dismantle that system once and for all and build a new one where we share equity in the way its protections are dispersed.
That is what those calling for a restructuring of our law enforcement are protesting for when they say “Abolish the Police”. And no, they’re not looking to live in a Mad Max dystopia devoid of accountability. They see a system that has failed to protect its citizens and needs radical reform and we, as said citizens, would benefit from a gradual transition to a system where we reallocate the budgets and resources of the billions of dollars invested in our police forces to create smaller, more specialized systems of protection. Those systems will be comprised of demilitarized mediators of the law locally based from within the community, social workers that can assist victims of assault to feel comfortable sharing and to process their traumas, mental health workers that treat nonviolent drug use as a health issue and not as a criminal offense, and the decriminalization of all other nonviolent crimes.
As a country representing less than 5% of the world’s population, we comprise 20% of all the incarcerated people in the world. We must purge the fathers, mothers, sons and daughters sitting in our overcrowded prisons for nonviolent crimes and provide them education and career resources to get back on their feet. Most importantly, we address criminal activity from a proactive, rather than reactive, measure. We reallocate funds to education departments and lift up local impoverished communities and those of color (which are most often the same communities) so we stop a culture of crime before it starts, and share pride in our refusal to uphold a culture that decides when crime begins.
