LaQuinn
On January 11th, my friend LaQuinn Gilmore — loving father, flaming hot MC, connoisseur of late night gas station cuisine — was assaulted by members of the Charlottesville police department. The story is in that link but, in short: LaQuinn was nauseated from antibiotics he was taking, pulled over his car to vomit on the side of the road, and was approached a police officer who several minutes later was body-slamming him to the sidewalk. In the intervening weeks, he has had to run a GoFundMe campaign to pay for his medical expenses.
Absolutely this is unacceptable behavior from an officer whose sworn duty it is to serve and protect members of our community, including LaQuinn. Absolutely I support disciplinary measures against this officer, and any others who took part in this incident or others like it. But the more I thought about the events, and after reading the stories and watching the video, and originally hearing about it from LaQuinn’s own mouth, there was another point that I really wanted to articulate:
White people like me need to stop telling the police that People of Color who appear intoxicated, or unstable, or in any way make us uncomfortable, should be treated like criminals.
As I said, I support holding the individual officer accountable for this incident. But we have to recognize that we, as a community, have given the police this mission. We have repeatedly told them, in language both explicit and coded, that People of Color who make us (the White community) uncomfortable need to be dealt with, violently if necessary.
This is decidedly not a new issue. It has been thought about and written about and talked about by many many people who are both more informed and more personally affected by it than I am. Trayvon Martin’s murder, which in many ways began our current mainstream racial awaking in America, is a classic example of this phenomenon. The infamous Cooper v. Cooper incident last summer in Central Park is probably the most recent high profile example. Danielle Moodie tied that encounter to a long history of lynching in America. Oo Nwoye wrote that he “feared the Amy Coopers more than the Derek Chauvins” because “They are the smiling neighbours that when they sit on jury duty, let the police executioner go. They are the journalists that use mugshots for black victims. They are the cashiers that give a nod to the security to follow that suspicious black shopper. They are the people that looked at me and my co-founder Obemde when we were kicked out of the Mountain View Bar…”
In 2018, roughly two years before our recently intensified bout of racial awakening, there was a string of high profile incidents of this nationally. At that time, Johns Hopkins professor (and UVa graduate) Vesla Mae Weaver wrote about it in Vox. The subtitle of her piece is “White people call the cops to remove black people because it often works.”
Obviously, this happens in Charlottesville too. Several months ago there was a local incident where the police were called on a Black man for walking through a neighborhood near UVa. This incident spiralled into all sorts of accusations and counter-accusations between concerned community members and the police department (for example from my wife, always on point). But my primary question remains: why were the police there in the first place? Because this man, who it turns out was literally on his way to his church a few blocks away, made some White people uncomfortable by walking near their homes. He likely won’t take that route again. Once again, “White people call the cops to remove black people because it often works.”
But the part that really stuck in my craw about LaQuinn’s story (and so many like it) is that, in places like Charlottesville, it works so well that we don’t even have to call the cops. The cops are so trained to this mentality that they will attempt to detain someone before they even have the chance to make us uncomfortable. Because they’re doing something that might make a White person uncomfortable. That is the police force that we — the prominent powerful supposedly liberal well-meaning White community — have created.
Last summer there was another incident, on the Downtown Mall, where an officer was caught by a civilian cell phone video violently subduing a man. Police Chief Brackney subsequently released body camera footage which, presumably, she believed exonerated her officer of wrongdoing. Certainly, you can see the man (who appears to be Latino) refusing to comply with the directions given to him by the officer. And certainly the man becomes angry and animated when he’s told that he is going to be arrested. And then he resists and the violence ensues; which, I should note, looks a lot more violent in the cell phone video, as opposed to the body camera which mostly just films the man’s shirt from 2 inches away while he is being pummeled.
But I ask again, why do we feel that this violence is a necessary response to a man who appears intoxicated and possibly unhoused and refuses to leave a public space? His crime, I believe, is making White people uncomfortable. We have given our police department the mandate to keep People of Color who make us uncomfortable under control and preferably out of our sight. Given this mandate, how can we expect the officer to act differently?
My personal opinion, which I’ll admit I’ve only arrived at over the course of the past year, is that the police should not be responding to these situations at all. I would advocate a publicly-funded team of unarmed interventionists trained in deescalation, conflict resolution, and mental health care. Cities like Minneapolis have already begun taking steps towards a system like this, though it has been met with predictable resistance and struggle along the way. The obvious “downside” to this arrangement is that these proposed interventionists could not use force, meaning that they could not arrest a man who is vomiting in front of his car or has passed out in front of a public store front.
We seem to imagine that this will make us all less safe. We only feel this way because we never imagine ourselves being one of those people.
Whether or not we think some alternative public safety force is the answer, this is the most important point for me: We live in a society with double-standards because we insist on them. We continue to give our tax dollars to an institution that we tell to enforce those double-standards. We continue to see it as a threat when a Person of Color is acting in “sketchy” way, which often entails the exact same behavior that we let slide from (mostly White) UVa students and young professionals after a random afternoon at a vineyard or a brewery or a football game or a basketball game or a concert or any of the other places that we proudly advertise in our tourism brochures. And often it entails a hell of a lot less, for example: the churchgoer mentioned above.
I have lived within the borders of Albemarle County my entire life and I have stumbled home drunk through the streets of this city more times than I’d like to admit. I can even remember vomiting in a public place at least two different times in years gone by. I don’t believe I have ever been approached by the police on any of these occasions and, if I was, I was certainly never followed and I was certainly never tackled to the ground. I have wandered aimlessly through neighborhoods all over this city at all hours of the day and night, and I am not aware of a single time that any residents have ever called the police on me.
In closing, yes, we need to hold our police department to a high standard of conduct. But we also need to realize that they are doing the job that the White community has been asking them to do for decades now. If we want that to change, then we need to stop asking them to do it. It will make some of us feel uncomfortable at times. It may make some of us feel less safe to know that we cannot call an armed officer of the law to interrogate someone we don’t recognize when they’re walking through our neighborhood. There may even be times when a person with truly ill will is ignored and ends up doing something violent. We will not feel good about this. But the current situation is that innocent members of our community are harassed and brutalized every day because of our paranoia and our thin skin. It is wrong and we need to stop.
Update March 2021:
Chief Brackney finally released the body camera footage and did a press conference about this incident, where she walks through the footage. There are a lot of things I don’t love about this presser — notably how she spends a significant portion of it detailing all the statements LaQuinn made on social media that she believes can be “disproved” by the videos — but there’s one thing I want to concentrate on.
You can first see the key moment around 7:40 in the video, and Chief Brackney actually highlights this starting at 15:35 in video. Basically, the officer checks on LaQuinn, LaQuinn says he’s alright, and the officer starts to walk back to his car. Then he hears LaQuinn say “cops be playin’ too much” into his phone and the officer turns right back around and starts asking for his license and registration.
Near the end of the press conference, around 26:30, Brackney talks about how they will use this incident as a teaching point for officers to “clearly communicate” why they are making demands of someone because, she notes, LaQuinn was driving and the officer does have a right to ask for his license. As if this is actually the problem! As if the officer telling LaQuinn “oh, sorry, I didn’t explain: I need to see your license because you’re next to a car that I assume you were driving…” would’ve resolved the tension.
No. The issue is that, based on an offhand comment LaQuinn made which the officer didn’t like, the officer decided to fuck with him. He begins the encounter by checking that his is alright, treating him as a citizen in need. But then he switches. Then he decides to use his power to intimidate and harass and ultimately slam him to the ground and detain him. For what?! What public safety purpose does this serve? This is about a bruised ego and a split-second calculation that LaQuinn is someone who can be fucked with.
That was the mistake and that is the lesson that I hope the Chief will pass on to her staff from this incident. And I stand by my earlier statements about White Charlottesville. We’ve been encouraging the cops to act this way for a long time and we need to stop.
