Scared White Driver
Yeah, I was scared. Shouldn’t have been, but I was.
A day ago, I was pulled over by the police.
An hour before I was pulled over, I was at the airport, picking up my husband from a recent business trip. The plane was delayed, getting his bag took longer than expected, and we weren’t back on the road until close to midnight. We then had an hour-long drive before we would make it back to our hometown.
We were off of the freeway and driving through the neighboring town when I noticed a police car. I noted his presence, but wasn’t overly concerned and continued on my way. My husband and I hadn’t seen each other in a week, so we were animatedly talking and laughing as I drove.
I was relaxed. I was relaxed even when I noticed the police car on the other side of the road, facing the opposite direction to my car.
At this stage, I’m not thinking about that police car. I’m tired and I want to get home.
We live in a relatively rural area. After living in Washington DC for years, it’s an adjustment to calmly drive through small towns with zero traffic at 1 a.m. in the morning.
I was going the speed limit through one small town, going the speed limit through the in-between road from that town to my own. That policeman probably was hoping to catch me at the less-than-a-mile stretch where the speed limit briefly drops 15 mph purely to catch speeders. And he did.
THIS is where I noticed the flashing lights in my rearview mirror. After everything in the news lately — the George Floyd murder, the Derek Chauvin trial, and the killing of Dante Wright, I’m nervous. I’m white, but I’m still nervous. I no longer think of the police as the “good guys.” I may have when I was young, but no more. After seeing the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, then learning over the following months just how many of those guys were police or ex-police, or military … yeah, the days of thinking they’re all the good guys are over for me.
I realized that, at 1 a.m., this policeman had purposefully turned his car around to follow me.
If I were alone, I would have tried to park in the parking lot of a highly lit area.
As it turned out, I had only noticed him when he had turned on his lights. Those lights came on just after I had passed the last fully-lit parking lot of a local business, and I was now on a country road. I pulled over to the side of the road. It was very dark — no street lights at all. And all I could think was “what if I were black? Where could I pull off and feel safe? I would be petrified right now. I’m pretty scared and I’m white AND my husband's in the car with me.”
My hand was shaking as I pushed the button to roll down the window. I immediately got my license out of my wallet to anticipate being asked for it.
A policeman walked up to my driver’s side window. He was polite. He was kind. He saw me and my husband, and he treated us with respect. He asked me for my license and said he would return to his car to check on it — but before he left, he said that I had been going 57 mph in a 35 mph zone. I didn’t argue with him, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t been going that fast. He asked for my husband’s license, too, … but my husband’s license was in his baggage in the back of the car.
My husband very slowly said “I would give you my license — but I’m just returning from a business trip and my license is in the back of the car in my luggage… Do you want me to go back there and get it?”
We’ve been married a long time. I know when my husband is nervous. We’ve watched enough news lately to think that, depending on which policeman pulls you over, sometimes these guys have a short fuse. My husband was trying to do everything exactly how the policeman specified … he was being really careful. Another thing that may have been in the back of his mind could have been this… when we lived in Washington DC, every single week he was asked by someone if he was Greek/Hispanic/Armenian/Arab/Italian, etc. We often joked — he could be from anywhere. His swarthy complexion was a great source of conversation, but when you get pulled over by the police, you start to wonder if that swarthy complexion is going to be a problem.
The policeman returned to our car and said that we were stopped because when he ran our license plate through “the system,” it showed that the owner of the car didn’t have a current driver’s license. The policeman did not require my husband to get into his luggage and pull out his driver’s license. He said ‘it’s probably just a glitch in the system’, and he didn’t know why it happened and he didn’t know what we should do to fix it. I didn’t get a ticket for speeding. He just let me off with a warning.
This could have gone so differently if we were different people
The policeman said his goodbyes, and we drove away in silence.
It’s always frightening to be pulled over by the police.
I was still shaking as we drove away. What if “our policeman” had been slightly off-kilter? What if he had been anti-immigrant and didn’t like the way my husband “looked”? What if he had been merely bored and hadn’t had an arrest in a while, and tonight was the night? Sure, this sounds like hyperbole, but it wasn’t hyperbole with George Floyd. That whole killing began with a bad check. One bad check.
We can no longer give all police the benefit of the doubt. After hearing just how many of our policemen are part of groups like the Proud Boys, I’m now scared of the police. But there are a lot of other Americans who were scared of the police for good reason a long time before I reached my conclusion.
It’s way more frightening and way more lethal if you are the George Floyds or the Dante Wrights of this world.
… and we have NO IDEA what it’s like to be in that position.
