My First Experience with Police Brutality

I’m No Stranger to Police Brutality — This Was My First Experience

My first experience ever with a police officer creeps into my mind like a faint shadow, a ghost that I can barely conjure up with even the utmost focus. I must’ve been two years old. I remember being a very small child, probably in a car seat, when my mom got pulled over with several others in the car. I remember a strange man in all black reaching into the car and checking our seatbelts. This dark, daunting figure reached his hand into the car with an outstretched hand that felt like it was going to swallow me whole. Even then, I knew that this person was in total control of the situation. It’s precisely that control, the kind of control that an infant can detect, that speaks volumes to the unilateral balance of power in the exchanges we have with police. After a brief discussion, the man who seemed so terrifying at the time to a toddler who couldn’t understand why this was all happening but could sense the fear of all of the adults in the car, politely left and our day returned to normal. This is how such interactions are supposed to go — when everything goes well.

Skip forward about ten or twelve years and my experiences began turning out otherwise, they started going the way of police brutality instead. As I grew older, more rebellious, more teenage, my encounters with cops shifted from ones of civility to ones where that same power discrepancy was being used to enforce the self-licensed moral authority of the officers in question.

In the wake of countless protests, instances of police brutality have skyrocketed. Videos have hit the internet en masse unabashedly displaying the raw, naked truth that so many of us have lived for a long time. They’re streaming across our feeds in real-time. They always make our mouths hang gaping wide open aghast with that toxic mixture of horror and fury that compels us to action — but what action? What do we even do about it? How do we challenge those whom we’ve given the license to be the arbiters of violence and, at least on some level, those we’ve impugned and insulated from any post hoc justice? Whether we like it or not, we’ve given the police in this country incrementally more free passes to do as they please with the power they’ve been entrusted with. In time, this has amounted to an outright assault on the otherwise peaceful public.

Why police brutality is so unjust is because there’s really nothing you can do — you can’t fight back. The power discrepancy for someone who finds themselves on the receiving end of a police beatdown knows all-too-well that the psychological paralysis stemming from the knowledge that you’re completely helpless, helpless like George Floyd was when he called out for the last thing any man does when they know they’re going to do — his mother. You can’t fight back. You must just accept that you have no control and that whether you live, or die is no longer a choice you get to make.

Anyone who’s been on the receiving end understands this down to the depths of their core, down in their soul, that it strikes you on such a visceral and unnerving level, that it pains you to even recall the level of dehumanization that accompanies abuses of power of this sort. Women who’ve been sexually assaulted by powerful men share this understanding of abuses carried out by those in power and the lack of justice that accompanies them.

My first memorable experience with police brutality came when I was fourteen or fifteen. I’d had other instances of police abuses of power before this — I’d even been cuffed and detained by cops for no crime at all — but never before was I violently assaulted until I turned 15-years-old.

It was a hot, muggy night at about 9:30 p.m. when I was dragged out from my parent’s house so the police could have a “chat” with me “to straighten me out.” We talked for a few moments, they wanted me to recite some words after them and to compel me to basically say that I was a stupid teenage kid and I would shut up and do what I was told. They picked the wrong stupid teenage kid, I guess. It sounds like a story almost out of a bad movie or cliché joke, with one cop being quite nice and understanding, the other being a total asshole who reminded me of the preacher who claims to have punched the child parishioner in the chest (remember that video?) To watch this guy describe punching this kid hits home because it’s so reminiscent of what happened to me years ago.

The next thing I know, my head hit the ground and I’d flipped almost entirely over backward. The stool had done several flips and ended up on the ground beside me. A full-force punch had propelled me out my tall barstool and the back of my head collided with the dirt faster than I think it had ever done up until that point. The impact was reminiscent of the old eighties' videos of crash test dummies, where the arms flail forward under the center-mass impact of the airbag.

The moment my head hit the ground was when the world began spinning. I remember feeling so helpless, looking up at the bare sky with shining, twinkling stars with their light raining down upon me, thinking, “This is just so unjust. The world can’t possibly be this unfair.”

In a weird way, the loud angry voice of the deputy sheriff and the commotion of the violent scene made the stars all that much more serene and peaceful, so many light-years away, indifferent, and unaffected. Just a few moments earlier, I was having a casual conversation and when the deputy’s fist spontaneously pummeled the center of my chest toward the bottom of my sternum — I had no idea what had hit me.

My chest was in deep pain and as I laid in the dirt, some of which had dusted up onto my face and into my hair, into my eyes, and into my mouth, as I pondered what move to make next. “Should I fight back? Should I accept that I’ll be arrested for assaulting an officer?” My thoughts whirled around as I mulled it over, flashing through my mind at the speed of light while high on the freshly pumping adrenaline and smell of disturbed grass that seemed like a narcotic at the time.

There I lay, arms stretched out and having just been assaulted by the county deputies, making up my young teenage mind which was worse, bowing my head in shame and living a coward or fighting a battle with two deputies I cannot win and perhaps dying or being arrested in the process. It’s easy for us on the internet to play sideline quarterback about such situations, but when you’re in the midst of the commotion and in the process of being assaulted with your fight-or-flight-or-freeze biology in full force, it’s a very different experience.

You don’t know helplessness until you’ve been brutalized by the police. You don’t know a rage that you must contain for an extended period until you’ve had someone use their power as leverage to abuse you. I’d rather lose a fair fight badly than not be able to fight back at all and I think every human being who’s truly in fear for their life and limb feels the same way when attacked.

But let’s back up for a minute because I know some people are going to ask what I did to cause the officers to react this way. I had spent the day at a friend’s house hanging out, being teenagers, nothing spectacular, it was a day that was rather boring. My friend smoked some weed, but I didn’t partake — I’ve never liked weed. At home, my parents at the time had lots of fights — alcohol was usually involved. In my house, someone could go insane at a moment’s notice. That was the tumultuous environment I happened to grow up in.

My friend brought me back to my house where I walked into a screaming match between my parents. I was exhausted and tried to avoid it, making a beeline straight for my door and closing it, trying to lock myself in my room for the evening. No dice.

I was dragged out and suddenly became the scapegoat of the fight. This has happened to me more times in my childhood than I could count. Even though I had committed no crime, my clearly intoxicated mother called the police and asked them to “take me away.” The county deputies arrived and decided to placate her. They decided to take me outside and have a chat with me. That’s when they brought with them a tall barstool, one that might have been about 4-feet tall, plopping me atop so they could tell me what a fuck-up I was. I stooped my head low in my Dark Funeral t-shirt, a t-shirt of an extreme metal band that drew both comments and ire from the deputies who’d arrived on the scene. It offended their delicate religious sensibilities. They told me I would shut up and learn to listen to my parents. I had no idea what was going on or why or what to make of the situation. I just said, “Okay,” smarmily, as any sarcastic teenager would, and they ordered me to repeat what they’d said, “Say it, I will shut up and listen to my parents,” asking me to recite this and several more things. “You can’t make me say this, man,” I replied.

That’s when the punch came. The night didn’t end like I presumed it would. The nicer cop calmed down the hot-headed deputy who’d punched me and they told me they weren’t going to take me in (even though I knew they couldn’t have) and I went back inside and — cried. I felt so alone. I felt so betrayed. Here I thought these people were out to help me. It was at this point that my view of society began to rust and decay, as I quickly began to realize that intemperate power truly rules the world. Something that must change.

There was a brief moment there where I’d heard the police were on their way and thought to myself it was a good thing — good because they could diffuse the situation and see that I was clearly doing nothing wrong, perhaps they could calm my parents who were fighting down and I could relax and get some sleep. But no dice. They didn’t want to hear a word I had to say. Their minds were made up before they arrived on the scene and were definitely made up once they took one good look at me and profiled me.

Fascism and police brutality are truly relevant to me because I got beat by the cops as a kid for nothing — no crime at all. It seems to have slowed down in my adulthood, but there is absolutely a police culture that coerces us into superfluous conformity. Police aren’t held accountable and haven’t been for an exceedingly long time. I was just a teen, what was I going to say or do, especially with inept parents who couldn’t tell their elbows from their assholes? That cop probably remained on the force for the rest of his days until he collected his pension, they both did.

Those of us who step outside of the norm, who look a little different, who don’t budge when we’re asked to shut up and kowtow and conform to illegal force, and even times when I just spoke what I thought or gave factual information about something they were asking about, I got my ass beat.

While there is a racial component to police brutality that cannot be denied, I think we’re finally starting to uncover the cold, dark, twisted reality that we’ve hired all the wrong people to police our world; uneducated, testosterone-fueled, often angry men drafted fresh out of high school, after six months in a police academy (which is less time than it takes to become certified to cut hair in most states), who are willing to disbelieve rape victims in order to uphold the “bro code”, savagely beat and kill Black people in the streets, and even going as far as to punch me square in the chest when I was a kid simply because they’ve been given license to do so.

So often it was done under the guise of “trying to get you on the right path” because they didn’t like the way I dressed or wore my hair or other material things they may have a disagreement over, but certainly, this isn’t what the police are for. It’s not the police’s job to execute moral codes but legal ones.

You see, Black Lives Matter reaches deep into my mind and finds its way to a visceral place in my entrails because, since that point in my life, that very first encounter of mine with police brutality, abuses by the cops have just been a fact of life. It came with the territory of wearing my hear in a mohawk or wearing the wrong band t-shirt in the Southern United States could get you targeted.

You see, conservatives have it twisted; because this entire time #BlackLivesMatter actually was #AllLivesMatter, they became so when they stood up for me; when they stood up for Daniel Shaver, a white man who was gunned down, executed by a cop while unarmed in a hotel hallway in Mesa, AZ — and the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter crowds were silent, of course. I don’t remember a time when this stuff wasn’t going on because I never looked like a status quo white person and spent a lot of my time living in ethnic neighborhoods.

If you don’t support the (peaceful) protests that are going on right now, you still have a chance to change your mind, time to analyze and ask yourself why you believe what you believe, and to get on the right side of history. Because while you may think you’re standing for something else, for stopping looting and riots or whatever you may think, there’s really just no way to deflect from the issue of police brutality right now and not endorse it. If you do, I have to take that as you’re being okay with that young boy that I was being innocent and beaten by the police. How else am I supposed to interpret it? At this moment in history, you’re either standing against police brutality or firmly for it. And yes, I’m going to demand explanations why you think cops ought to be able to beat innocent adults and even kids.

A final word, I don’t mean to detract from the fact that Black people experience police brutality to a degree that I’ll never be able to comprehend or fathom. Surely, this is a moment where none of us can really begin to hold a candle to the amount of sheer and ugly brutality Black people suffer from — but it isn’t only Black people, it can happen to anyone. I am here to point out that it’s always been a part of my life and it affects all of us. It just affects Black people much more. But this is a national problem and a legal crisis that we must address right now.