Saturday, May 17, 2008
Jul 26, 2000 | "Tell me a police story." My little boy made this request almost daily as I drove him to and from day care in Philadelphia. He was not yet 3, but somehow he had acquired a fascination with police.
So I made up police stories for him. They featured "Officer Big Man" and "Officer Little Guy" -- police partners named by my son -- whose work mostly involved checking out reports of giant, dinosaurlike monsters wandering the woods behind a little boy's house.
In real life, however, the police story that had captured my attention at the time was the case of Amadou Diallo, the young West African immigrant killed when four New York Police Department officers fired 41 shots at him, hitting Diallo 19 times, as he reached for his wallet.
But I kept that story from my son.
As a black mother, I know I'll have to explain race and racism to him someday. But it seemed unreal -- cruel -- to explain the 41 shots to a brown boy still negotiating the final details of potty training.
Still, I was torn as I watched my son strut around, macholike, pretending to be a cop. I didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm or imagination, nor did I want to teach him to be hostile toward police. When a close friend had asked what my son wanted for his third birthday, I told her. So he was outfitted with handcuffs and a badge and had his own police station with tiny toy cars and figures of a cop and robber.
Part of me couldn't believe I was helping him play out his fantasy just as the Diallo case was unfolding in New York. Part of me hoped -- yet knew it was unlikely -- that his love of playing cops would actually inoculate him from police "overreaction" in the future.
"Hey, I'm a cop too," he proudly told the security officer at my office. Then my son showed how he used his "backup," as he called his toy walkie-talkie, to call for assistance, something he'd learned from our daily police stories. "This is car 99, this is car 99, I need backup, I need backup," he mimicked.
Yet, and as I write this, I think about the off-duty and undercover black cops who are wounded, sometimes killed, when white officers coming into potentially dangerous scenes don't recognize their black colleagues as fellow cops. They see only black men with guns.
How will I tell this brown boy so caught up in the allure of being a "cop" that one day he will have to be careful not to make a sudden move if he is stopped by police? How will I tell him about racial profiling, that some people will look at his skin color and automatically see him as suspect?
This is a child whose eyes lit up as we drove past a white police officer parked in his SUV one morning. My son began waving and smiling. It took the surprised officer a few seconds before he waved back.
On trips to the mall or the post office, he has run up to police or security officers -- black and white -- eager to talk with them and ask questions. My neck stiffened in a prelude to real fear when one police officer asked -- almost officially -- "What's your name, young man?"
For African-Americans, no matter how law-abiding we are, no matter how much we respect and appreciate the dangers the police face as they do their jobs, history has instilled a fear of encounters with police officers, a fear that's especially intense for our young black men.
My boy's fascination with police began to dim somewhat as he approached his fourth birthday. But my concerns grew deeper when, closer to home, on Jan. 10, a policeman shot and killed 26-year-old Erin Forbes.
Police said the part-time college student, who had been working as a security guard in an upscale Philadelphia suburb, had robbed a convenience store clerk of $4 at 5 in the morning. After a police chase, they said, Forbes allegedly charged at a policeman with a walking cane.
In the dark early morning hours, the cane looked like a barrel of a gun, Philadelphia district attorney Lynne M. Abraham told the press. She said the police officer was justified in shooting Forbes.
Ella Forbes, a Ph.D. in African-American studies who teaches at Philadelphia's Temple University, does not believe the police version of what happened to her son. She says he would never steal from a store clerk. She believes Erin, who was stopped frequently by police as he drove from his suburban home to work, school and volunteering in North Philadelphia, was just angry.
"He once said he had a 'good week' because he had been stopped by police only three times," says Forbes. She believes he had a dispute with the store clerk, either over a perceived racial slight or over the change for his purchase. But he would never steal.
"That just wasn't Erin," she says. "Erin was so righteous, so honest."
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