I was almost home when I, too, was blinded by Prospero’s bloodred and cold, blue flashing lights and deafened by his high-pitched gulp of a cry—Woop-woop! Woop-woop! I pulled my car over and came to a full stop in front of a check cashing spot and a thin storefront with a handwritten sign that read OFF THE CHAIN BAIL BONDS.
Possible (not probable) causes cascaded through my mind—Maybe my brake lights are out… Maybe my tag’s expired… Damn, maybe I didn’t pay those parking tickets… Nah, I paid them—as a cop approached my car, crushing gravel beneath his bulky boots.
“Problem?” I asked, as a pale, paunchy man whose eyes were veiled with tinted shades arrived at my door.
“Where you coming from?” the officer questioned.
“Brooklyn,” I told him as I scanned his tag—I. CLARK—into my memory.
“Brooklyn?” he said, surprised. “What’s in Brooklyn?” I knew that, because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, I wasn’t obliged to answer his questions, but because I wanted to get home as soon as possible, I did.
“I was conducting an interview,” I said plainly.
“License and registration,” he requested as his eyes, chasing the orb of his flashlight, searched through my car.
“It’s in the glove compartment,” I stated.
“Slowly,” he warned.
My hands, moving in calculated slow motion, floated toward the glove compartment when—
“I said slow,” the cop screeched as he grabbed the handle of his Glock. “Unless you want to get shot!” His voice harshened.
At that moment, I came to the pungent realization—just as so many, too many, before me have—that this already tragic encounter could very easily conclude with that gun, which his pink hand was now molesting, tugged out of its dark nest, aimed at me, and fired multiple times into my Black body. What’s worse is that this outcome, which was not at all uncommon, was beyond my control. If I followed his instructions, he might, overwhelmed by an unwarranted but very real fear, imagine my wallet or cell phone to be a gun and shoot me. If I didn’t follow his instructions, then he would certainly send shots my way. Either way, because of my hue and, indeed, his, he had carte blanche. With my back against the wall, I knew, as James Baldwin did when he inked A Dialogue, that “he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.”
My fingertips and palms, moist with the anxiety of sudden death, handed him my license and registration.
“Why was I stopped?” I asked.
“Hold tight,” he said, as he took my papers and turned around.
“Why was I stopped?” I repeated as he wobbled back to his squad car.
I watched him, through the sharp panorama of my mirror, as he ran my papers. I was reminded of the armed white men, dubbed “pattie rollers” by African-Americans, who were deployed throughout the South to patrol and prevent slave rebellions. These pattie rollers, which white men in the South were required to serve in, patrolled exclusively at night, traveling on horseback from plantation to plantation, harassing Black people, looking for contraband (weapons, liquor, books, et cetera) that might indicate a plan to flee. Pattie rollers were instructed to viciously lash any enslaved African without a written pass. In North Carolina, a law ordered pattie rollers to whip on the spot any “loose, disorderly or suspected person” found among enslaved Africans. It was from these pattie rollers, funded by local taxes, that many modern policing concepts were derived. For example, pattie rollers, like modern police, referred to patrollers’ designated areas of operation as “beats.”
M.K.A.: Why did the cops start harassing y’all?
Dead Prez: There’s nothing we did wrong except for being Africans in our community and standing up for what we believe in. This ain’t a new struggle, it happens to thousands and thousands of Africans each day. Our comrades had been accosted by the police, who came up and asked, I guess suspiciously, that they show ID. There is no law on the books that states that in New York City you have to walk around with your ID in your pocket nor do you have to show it to the police. We had the right to ask “why.” Because we know our rights and also because we are always aware that there is this constant engagement going on between the people in the community and the occupying army, which to us, comes to us in the form of the police department. We knew that we had rights and our rights were that we ask, “Why? Why do we have to show ID?” Not that we were resisting showing ID but we have the right to ask why. Why? Why were we even being questioned at all? When that was asked there was no reasonable response by the pigs, or the police, as some of y’all call them. Since they couldn’t come up with any reason why they were asking for ID and because we were firm with the fact that we knew we had rights, they began to call for help in that situation, because the community was around. It’s a Saturday, in the middle of the day, we’re shining, resilient Black soldiers, RBG [revolutionary but gangsta] in the broad daylight, you know. I believe that they saw this as a position that they didn’t really want to back down from. I think they wanted to be seen as the people who run the block. But we know that it’s the people who run the block. So, they called for backup and so some more pigs came. These pigs came in white shirts, I guess this means that they are special kinda pigs, ’cause those other pigs were in blue.
I think that not knowing what to do, because we knew our rights and we insisted to know why, we never backed down on why. We never said no, but we insisted on why. I think the pigs then gave the order that they move in on us and start handcuffing brothas. They started to try to handcuff each and every one of us. They began to try to move forward, handcuff us, harass us. Some of us were handcuffed. Dedan, one of my comrades, wouldn’t be handcuffed easily, because we don’t back down easily. We just don’t. There is no reason to, especially because we’ve only been criminalized; we’re not criminals. At that, they began to show excessive force, at that point we began to show more force. And that’s when, to me, the brutalization began. My partner Nes was beaten so bad his eyes became swollen. Dedan was slammed onto the hood of the police car, the pigs’ car, and four of our comrades were consequently taken to the seventy-seventh precinct where they were given no due process for twenty-four hours in a cold cell, with no rights to medical treatment, and no rights to phone calls—pretty much the standard arrest procedures for brothas.
M.K.A: What happened next?
Dead Prez: We ended up inside the central booking, in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Central Booking, Brooklyn House, about thirty-six hours later. Then from there some of the comrades sat inside the holding cell until this kangaroo court thing happened. The pigs grabbed them up, called their names, and like some old back-in-the-days Mississippi shit, opened the back door and booted them out the back door. Like, “Don’t say nothing. Y’all just go.” And they kept one of them, without any reason at all. So, three of the comrades were released, through the back door, with no due process, still no due process, not even speaking to anybody who would have any semblance of leadership in this whole thing, including the judge or any pigs. But one of my comrades was still held hostage, held kidnapped, ’cause that’s what it was, he was kidnapped, not arrested—kidnapped. He remained kidnapped until we freed him. We freed him and he faces charges of aggravated assault, assaulting an officer, and resisting arrest. And one of them is a felony charge. A felony resisting arrest charge, I mean what is that? Really, his hands were handcuffed. So, right now we’re still facing court dates.
M.K.A.: Has the community been supportive of you and your comrades?
Dead Prez: On the first court date we held a conference, which was basically for our community to know that when the pigs jive us like this, there are things that we can do: there is community action and legal action to be taken. Our intent by holding the press conference, which was held at the House of the Lower Church, Reverend Herbert Daugherty’s church, which is a historical place for struggle, and right around the corner from the courthouse. We hel
d the press conference to announce to the community that not only would we be a part of the people’s self-defense campaign which has been administered and run by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which is similar to a cop-watch program, but also that we would be suing the New York Police Department and the state of New York for its crimes against us. We’ve had words of support from people like Charles Barron and Mos Def, and from the National Hip-Hop Action Network and from the ACLU, believe it or not, and community organizations like Black Arts Collective. Because it was just well supported, we were able to get it out into the broadstream media about what had gone down and that was on the first day of court. And me being in a leadership role, at that point, as the president of the Uhuru Movement, we planned demonstrations that really rocked the courthouse. Pumped in thousands and thousands of leaflets, probably fifty thousand leaflets. So all these people who were going into court the same day we had to go to court… were all victims, too, so they felt the same way we did.
Everything came back clean. No tickets. No warrants. No nothing.
“Do you have any drugs or weapons in the car?” the officer asked.
“You still haven’t told me why I was stopped,” I stressed.
“One more time. Do you have any drugs or weapons,” he repeated, resting his hand on his gun (again).
“I’ve got a registered handgun and a permit to carry it,” I stated.
I felt his demeanor morph and I could see from the involuntary breach between his cold lips that he wanted to say something. I anticipated him asking me, “Why are you brandishing a firearm?” And I anticipated telling him that although I hated guns—and never have liked them, not even as toys!—I was overcome just a few weeks prior with the awful feeling of not being able to save my own life. The trigger for me was when Sean Bell, twenty-three, an unarmed Black man and father of three children, was shot in a vicious hail of fifty bullets on the night before his wedding.
I’d made up my mind that I was not going out like Patrick Bailey, the twenty-two-year-old unarmed Black man shot and killed by twenty-seven NYPD bullets. Or Amadou Diallo, the twenty-three-year-old unarmed Black man who was shot forty-one times and killed by four plain-clothes NYPD officers. Or Abner Louima, another unarmed Black man who was beaten by the NYPD, and then sodomized by Officer Justin Volpe with the filthy handle of a toilet plunger, severely rupturing his colon and bladder, before Volpe jammed the excrement-soiled stick down his throat, damaging his teeth, gums, and mouth. Mos Def, during the Diallo trial, asked, “At this rate, can we expect the hail of fifty-five bullets to be unloaded on another New Yorker by next fall?” He reminded folks that “this is not a Black issue, it’s a human issue.”
I thought about the family of Artrell Dickerson, the eighteen-year-old boy who was gunned down by Detroit police during a funeral, just a few weeks after Bell’s murder. Dickerson’s family, in a passionate statement that is a challenge to all of us, wrote:
I charge you to prove that the actions of this officer (who still remains anonymous) were justified. I charge you to prove that Artrell’s death was not over-kill that he did not die face down on the ground with as many as six bullets in him on a cold Monday afternoon, in broad daylight with up to a hundred men, women, and children as witnesses to murder. I charge you to prove to this community that black men are not being killed indiscriminately in the city of Detroit at the hands of police officers whose crimes are being covered. Until then we will not be silenced because we are empowered in our belief that Artrell’s death is characteristic of many other killings of African American men in inner cities across the United States at the hands of police officers. And we wish to inform and empower the public to demand the respect and protection of the lives of our brothers, cousins, fathers, uncles, and friends. Artrell Dickerson will not have died in vain.
I decided that unlike Bailey, Diallo, Louima, Bell, Dickerson, and countless others too numerous to name, I would not be unarmed, and that if they shot at me, I would shoot back with everything I had. The logic: If white police officers love their families as much as we love our Black units, then knowing we are armed as well, perhaps they will think twice before they shoot at us. “As the racist police escalate the war in our communities against black people, we reserve the right to self-defense and maximum retaliation,” former Black Panther leader Huey Newton said while incarcerated on bogus charges. And this wasn’t just rhetoric, Newton saved his own life by firing back at Oakland police officers when they attempted to assassinate him in 1967. Similarly, Tupac Shakur, in 1993, shot two off-duty police officers who were harassing him and a Black motorist. When it was discovered that the cops were drunk and in possession of stolen weapons, all charges against Tupac were dismissed.
We must never mistake the self-defense of the victim for the violence of the attacker. Self-defense is not an act of violence, but rather an act of self-love and self-preservation. In 1919, when a thick brush of race riots swept across the country like wildfire, Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay responded with “If We Must Die,” a poem urging Blacks to fight back. McKay’s poem, written nearly a century ago, spoke to me now:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but *fighting back!
M.K.A.: Do you believe your experience was an isolated incident or symbolic of a larger national problem?
Dead Prez: New York is no different than Florida, no different than California, no different than Cincinnati, no different than Philadelphia. So that shows you what we’re dealing with. It’s the same pigs, the same pig mentality, and the same enforcement that’s going down, the only thing that is changing is the people that they’re arresting. They’re arresting more and more of us and they’re getting to the babies now. It’s the same blue steel ring around our community, which attempts only in criminalizing us with no social justice, we get no justice at all. At the end of the day we are still locked out economically, so it’s the same war around the hood. You know the only thing they leave us with is dope to sell and a basic demoralization in the hood. We’re here to provide, to say that we won’t be demoralized and that we’re gonna stand up and that there’s something that you can do, you can organize to fight for your damn rights and don’t punk out. Let’s do it for the babies so the babies don’t have to come up and live in terror ’cause that’s what it is: it’s police terror inside our communities. It’s terrorism and it’s been long before that. I really believe that there’s a syndrome that we need to be aware of that happens inside of our community. It happens to me all the time where I don’t even drive a car because I know if the police pull up behind me, chances are I probably will go to jail. It’s not because I’m doing anything illegal, it’s because we are made criminal just by where we live and the profiling that happens when we’re doing what we do. Once again, the U.S. law, you know, that’s Amerikkkan justice with a triple “k.”
The officer didn’t ask me why I had a gun; he had something else in mind.
“You don’t mind if I take a look around, do ya?” The officer slurred as he opened my door.
“Actually, officer, I don’t consent to a search of my private property,” I informed him, myself informed by a fairly good understanding of my Fourth Amendment rights, which state:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers
, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
“You hiding something?” the officer pried.
“No,” I said flatly, “I’m exercising my Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.” I knew that according to the Plain View Doctrine, he could only initiate a search if an illegal item was in plain view and that the only reason he was asking me to consent to a warrantless search was because he didn’t have enough evidence to search without my consent. I also knew, from both common sense and previous experiences, that just because a law is on the books, its application is much less clear, especially where race is concerned. After all, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott vs. Sandford that Blacks “had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.” But this didn’t deter me from asserting my rights because in that same year, Frederick Douglass warned:
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 15
