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Sparkle (1)
A couple of years ago, Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, was arrested on the front porch of his Cambridge, Massachusetts home. At the time, I wrote a piece for Babble.com (which was also reprinted in Adoptive Families Magazine) about what the incident meant for parents of Black children -- especially, perhaps, white parents of Black children -- and what such children ought to be taught about the police.
I had two small Black daughters and was torn between how to represent the police to them. Should I tell them that Officer Friendly was there to help them? Or teach them to avoid uniforms whenever possible?
It was still a theoretical question until yesterday. Yesterday, my six year-old got a personalized lesson about who the police are when she met her very first police officer, face-to-face. Here’s how it went:
My daughter was sitting behind me in the car when I pulled into the street on my green light. Once I was in the middle of a very busy intersection (Route 1, in Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania), an unmarked police car hit its lights and siren and came into the intersection, cutting me off.
I stopped to wait for it to pass, assuming it was going after some car in the cross-traffic. While I waited, however, several cars followed it, against the light.
The cars were not marked in any special way, and I suddenly became worried that the green light wasn’t my light after all. I was puzzling it out when a huge slam hit the window of my door. It was a police officer’s hand.
My daughter burst into terrified tears and began sobbing and begging me “what’s going on, Mama Shannon?”
I rolled down the window, wondering what was happening, and the cop who had hit my window, his partner just behind him, began shouting at me, calling me a [bleeping bleep], telling me to get my head out my [bleep] and didn’t I see this was a funeral procession?
(Honestly, no, I didn’t see that. As I said, neither the police car, nor the procession cars were marked in any way. I suppose their lights were on, but so were mine and everyone else’s because it was overcast and raining. The cop car only hit the siren and lights after I was in the intersection.)
The police officer and his partner continued to harangue me -- at the top of their lungs -- asking me what the [bleeping bleep] I thought I was doing.
My daughter continued wailing and began to hyperventilate, still begging me to tell her what was happening.
Throughout all this I was very calm. I realized now that I had made an honest, and fairly understandable mistake, rather than stupidly blundered into traffic against my signal. I vaguely wondered when the police would get to writing me a ticket but was mostly concerned that my daughter was hysterical and that if these men knew they were shouting curses not just at an adult, but a little girl, maybe they would take it down a notch and reassure her in some way.
I (stupidly, regrettably) rolled her window down and said, quite calmly, “Please don’t speak to me this way in front of my child.”
The second cop, at this point, waved his fist in my daughter’s general direction and shouted, “I don’t care!”
By now, the cars in the funeral procession had passed. The light changed and now I was sitting in the middle of a busy intersection in front of a red light. The cops looked at me and my daughter, shouted, “sit there in the intersection and I hope you get hit!” got back in their car and drove away.
Of course I didn’t snap a phone photo of the car. Of course I didn’t even notice what jurisdiction they were from. Of course I didn’t ask for their badges or names (not that I believe they would have given me that information, seeing as how they neither ticketed me, nor helped me cross the intersection safely and in fact, wished aloud for me -- with a child in my car -- to be hit.
It took about an hour for me to calm my daughter down. “But Mama Shannon, we didn’t take off our seat belts!” she wailed. (This is the most important traffic violation she knows of.) “That man looked at me very mean and said ‘I don’t care! I hope you get hit!’”
So much for Officer Friendly. My daughter now has her own opinion of the police and she has
