Will the Police Kill You Too, Dada?
By: Kerala Taylor
Tags: Parenting, Police Brutality, Motherhood, BlackLivesMatter, Interracial

My husband hasn’t (yet) stared down the barrel of a police gun, but he has been pulled over by the police no fewer than 52 times. He has been arrested 13 times and beaten five.

He will be the first to admit that as a young adult, he wasn’t always on the “right” side of the law. Living on his own in his late teens and struggling to support himself on minimum wage, he devised a plan to cash fake money orders. It was a plan that worked quite well, until it didn’t, and it eventually landed him six months in jail.

My husband hasn’t (yet) stared down the barrel of a police gun, but he has been pulled over by the police no fewer than 52 times.

But here is the bitter irony: the vast majority of his police encounters, including the five beatings, were not even tangentially related to his brief flirtation with a life of crime. A (white) woman once rear-ended him, and he ended up in handcuffs. Three (white) men accosted him and called him a “black bastard,” and he found himself in jail with a felony charge. Once, he was driving his blue Volvo (the car one buys to avoid police attention) and was pulled over because the police were looking for a (Black) suspect driving a black car. On another occasion, he was beat up by a police officer because he had the audacity to talk to his friends in a parking lot.

Growing up in Salt Lake City, my husband was taught by his all-white schools and churches that police officers were good people, there to protect and serve. His mother told him that the protecting and serving part didn’t really apply to Black people, but he didn’t believe her.

Then he transitioned from a cute little boy with an Afro and dimples to a lanky, wide-shouldered teen with a baseball cap that he wore in the “wrong” direction because he thought it looked cool. That’s when the trouble started.

You just never know.

Of course, you never know about a lot of things. I could be studying the ingredients of a breakfast cereal in the same grocery store aisle as a sexual predator, or my child could be swinging next to the child of a self-proclaimed Nazi at the playground.

The three crucial differences are that unlike your average Nazi or sexual predator:

Police can pull you over while you’re driving a car (98% of my husband’s run-ins with the law have involved a car). They are guaranteed to have a lethal weapon on them when they do so. They are able to use said lethal weapon without the same legal consequences as “ordinary” citizens.

When you don’t have time to build a relationship and figure out whether or not someone is trustworthy, when your interaction comes down to a few curtly exchanged words and a potentially misinterpreted hand gesture that may or may not end in a bullet to the chest, should we teach our Black and brown children to trust at all? For their own safety, is it better to assume the worst?

My daughter is fearless in almost every sense of the word, unless there’s a bumblebee in the vicinity, or there is a chance she might get water in her eyes. But if we walk by a police officer, or a police car, her hand will clench my arm and she will look up at me with her round, bottomless eyes and declare, “Mom, I don’t want them to kill me.”

I brought my children into the world knowing the dangers and heartaches they would face, dangers and heartaches of which their white peers would be blissfully unaware. Dangers and heartaches of which I was blissfully unaware, even as a progressive, socially conscious child of hippie parents in San Francisco.

You hear about travesties in the news, but if you’ve never had to bail a loved one out of jail, or place your loved one’s future in the hands of an overworked public defender, or spend your life savings fighting fabricated felony charges, the travesties are just abstract stories that one can shake one’s head about and tsk tsk over and eventually forget.