by Rosa Brooks
* * *
• • •
Since the unconscious guy had looked dead, it didn’t at first occur to me that the dead guy we encountered later that night was anything other than unconscious. We were called to a housing project we had already visited three or four times that evening, for one thing or another: noisy youths congregating in the hallway, a report of someone selling drugs in the small strip of grass between buildings, a burglary. Then we got a call about an unconscious man. We left the car skewed across the parking lot and ran to the apartment door, me fumbling to jam my notebook back into my pocket without dropping any of my other equipment.
An elderly woman in a nightgown urged us inside. “My husband isn’t moving!” Her voice was high and quavery with panic. “He was just watching football, then he went into the bathroom, and when he didn’t come out I got worried. I opened the door and he was just lying there. I can’t wake him up.”
Sure enough, there he was, an elderly man lying on his back on the bathroom floor. He looked like he had passed out, and his dark brown skin had a grayish cast. I hesitated. I had only been a police officer for a short time, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I try nudging him in the shoulder too? It had worked with the first guy.
My partner for the night, a young Haitian American called Auguste, was more experienced. He pushed right past us and started CPR. Behind us, sirens wailed: the ambulance was arriving. A team of medics rushed in, and within seconds the bathroom was a hive of activity as they ripped off the old man’s shirt and attached defibrillator pads to his chest.
I turned to the wife, small and bewildered in her nightgown. “Let’s give them some space, okay? Let’s sit down and you can tell me what happened.”
I think we were both glad to have something to do. We sat on the overstuffed living room sofa, surrounded by family photos, inspirational needlepoints, and small statues of angels. There were angels everywhere: Statues of angels. Pictures of angels. Needlepoints of angels. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like angels.
I took out my notebook and started asking questions: What’s your name, ma’am? Margaret . . . Carter . . . ? What’s your husband’s name? Jesse, with an e at the end. Named for Jesse Owens, no kidding. How about his date of birth?
I scribbled everything down in my patrol notebook: phone number, social security number, medical history. Was her husband taking any medications? Had he had any heart problems? Had he complained about feeling weak or sick or dizzy recently? The medics were still crowded into the bathroom, working on her husband, so when I ran out of relevant questions, I started asking irrelevant ones, just to have something to do.
What had Mr. Carter done for a living? Which football teams did he prefer? Did they have children? Grandchildren? Really, how old were they?
After a while the medics slid Mr. Carter onto a gurney. They had him hooked up to an automatic CPR machine, and his chest rose and fell percussively. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. The medics carried him past all the angels and out to the ambulance, then sped off, sirens wailing.
“Is he all right?” asked Mrs. Carter.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “But the medics, they’re the best in the business, and I know they’re doing everything they can.”
I had no idea if the medics were really the best in the business. But it seemed like the thing to say.
We followed the ambulance to the hospital, where Mrs. Carter was joined in the ER’s waiting room by her grown children and their spouses. It was Sunday evening, and they were all dressed like they’d come straight from church. Auguste and I trailed a team of doctors and nurses to an emergency room bay, where everyone bustled around Mr. Carter’s inert form. We stood just outside. I tried not to stare. Auguste paced back and forth, scowling.
After a while, all the doctors and nurses abruptly turned and left, a nurse pulling the curtain partially closed around Mr. Carter’s bed. They took the CPR machine away with them and everything got very quiet.
I peered through the gap in the curtains. Mr. Carter had EKG stickers dotting his chest. There were tubes taped to his hands, and tubes sticking out of his nose. His eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He wasn’t moving.
“Oh, God,” said Auguste. He slumped down to the floor and sat with his head in his hands. He looked like he was going to cry.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He stared at the floor. “I just . . . I just hate death. You know? I hate it.”
“You did everything you could,” I told him, meaning it. “You were amazing. I had no idea what to do, but you just rushed in and started CPR. I was so impressed. If anyone could have saved him, it was you.”
Auguste shook his head. “It just seems so unfair. There he is, watching football on TV, then suddenly he’s dead, and his family’s going to be so sad, and we couldn’t do anything about it. I just hate it.”
I stopped a passing nurse. “Mr. Carter’s family is out in the waiting room,” I told her. “Is someone speaking to them?”
“Yes, the doctor’s about to go talk to them,” she assured me.
We sat in the hallway for another half hour, Auguste still hunched over with his face in his palms, Mr. Carter still dead. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies rushed by every few minutes, no one giving Mr. Carter’s body a second glance.
I was starting to feel anxious. Weren’t we supposed to be out patrolling?
A little more time passed. After a while, I asked, “Should we go?”
“We can’t,” said Auguste from between his hands. “We have to wait for the detective. They have to send a homicide detective to do an investigation, even though it looks like a natural death. I’ll call him and see where’s he at.”
He pulled himself up and went out into the hall. I waited. When he returned ten minutes later, he said, “The detective’s on his way. He wants you to go out to the waiting room to make sure the family doesn’t leave before he gets here and can talk to them.”
“Sure.” I pushed through the emergency room’s double doors, preparing myself to offer condolences. Mrs. Carter and her family were huddled together on a sofa in the corner. I went and knelt down beside her, putting my hand on her arm.
“Mrs. Carter, I am so, so sorry about your husband.”
Her head snapped up. “Is he all right?”
I was confused. “What?”
“How is he? Is he all right, officer?”
Shit.
I took a deep breath. “Mrs. Carter . . . I’m so very sorry. He didn’t make it.”
Mrs. Carter let out a wail and crumpled over. Around me, everyone else started to wail too. I was mortified. The family had been sitting here for over an hour while Mr. Carter lay there, dead, a few meters away, and no one on the hospital staff had bothered to tell them.
“I’m so sorry,” I said helplessly. “I thought the doctor had been out to speak to you. Mrs. Carter, I’m so, so sorry to break the news to you and your family like this.”
But no one was listening: they were too busy weeping and clutching one another. I sat down on a chair and watched everyone cry.
Eventually, the detective arrived, and beckoned me back into the ER and behind the curtain. “So, you’re new, yeah? Cool, welcome to beautiful 7D. Your partner says you’re the one that’s got all the information, huh? Okay, give me the rundown. What happened?”
He pulled on rubber gloves and started poking and prodding Mr. Carter’s body, looking, I suppose, for anything that might suggest something other than a simple heart attack: suspicious bruising, or a gunshot wound that had somehow escaped the doctors’ attention. I took out my notebook and described how we had arrived on the scene.
“Okay, good, good, okay, you got his social and everything?” the detective asked. He pulled aside the blanket covering Mr. Carter’s lower body and distractedly lifted his geni
tals, glancing underneath. I read out the social security number, and the detective shifted his attention to the soles of Mr. Carter’s feet, then gave a satisfied nod. He drew the blanket back over the body. “Great, okay, everything here looks fine. Let me just jot that number down and do a bit of paperwork, then I can go talk to the family. I’m not seeing anything that bothers me here, so this should be quick.”
While the detective interviewed the still-weeping family, I waited in the corridor with Auguste and one of the medics who had worked on Mr. Carter in the ambulance. Auguste seemed to have gotten over his despondency, and he and the medic were exchanging animated views about the residents of the Seventh District.
“Animals,” declared Auguste. “I come here from Boston. As soon as I can, I’m going back there. You could not fucking pay me to live in 7D.”
The medic, a middle-aged black guy, pursed his lips. “I live downtown. I’ll tell you, I drive around here and I see these kids on the corners, and they say to me, ‘Hey man, what you lookin’ at?’ And I say to them, ‘Dead people. I’m looking at dead people.’”
“Dead people?” asked Auguste.
“Yeah, man, I call these kids the walking dead. They’re dead, they just don’t know it yet. Give ’em a few years and some more smack and some more guns, and they’re gonna be riding in my ambulance, in body bags. You see what I’m saying?”
“Fucking animals,” Auguste agreed dolefully.
“And they keep having babies!” The medic gave a disgusted shake of his head. “They oughta clip these people, you know? Stop them reproducing, stop ’em making more dead people.”
* * *
• • •
Later that night, we were called back to the same housing project, yet again. Police dispatchers in DC indicate the nature of each call on the patrol car’s mobile data terminal using a series of acronyms, most of them opaque to the noninitiated: there was MADO, for “Man Down,” DISO for “Disorderly Conduct,” PWID for “Possession With Intent To Distribute,” FADI for “Family Disturbance,” and so on. The acronyms were also used to identify calls on shift run sheets and to label body-worn camera videos, but the only way to learn them was through experience; they weren’t taught in the academy, and if there was a master list somewhere, no one I knew had ever seen it. As a new officer, I was constantly having to ask my more experienced colleagues to translate for me.
This call was marked “ITT” on the car’s mobile data terminal.
“What’s ITT?” I asked Auguste.
“‘Investigate The Trouble.’ Usually means somebody called 911 and asked for the cops, then hung up without saying anything else.”
We could hear The Trouble all the way from the parking lot: two irate female voices.
When we entered the stairwell, a woman could be heard screaming from behind the closed front door of a second-floor apartment. “Get away from here! You know you ain’t allowed to be here! You get the fuck away from here right now!”
The object of the invisible woman’s rage seemed to be a slender girl who was pounding hard on the apartment door. Tears were streaming down the girl’s face.
“Let me in!” she cried. “You gotta let me in! I fucking live here!”
I was readying myself to offer a textbook police intervention, something along the lines of “Excuse me, ma’am. Did you call 911? What seems to be the problem?”
But Auguste, once again jumping in while I hesitated, rushed up the stairs.
“You stop that screaming,” he ordered the girl. “You know you can’t be here! I’m sick and tired of you acting this way!”
Then everyone started yelling at once—the screaming woman on the other side of the door, the girl, Auguste.
It took a while, but eventually I pieced together some of what was happening. The invisible woman behind the closed apartment door was the girl’s mother; her sixteen-year-old daughter had been ordered by a court into her aunt’s custody, but the daughter was refusing to stay at the aunt’s house, insisting she wanted to “go home” instead. Her mother wasn’t having it. Apparently this was a long-standing issue. I never did figure out the background. Had the mother abused or neglected the daughter and the daughter been sent to live with her aunt for her own protection? Had the daughter assaulted the mother and been on the receiving end of a stay-away order?
Either way, Auguste was unsympathetic. “You want to walk out of here, or you want me to drag you out of here?” he shouted at the girl, who kept screaming and banging her fists against the door. From the other side of the locked door, her mother screamed back. Auguste shouted some more, grabbed the girl by the arm, and started trying to yank her down the stairs. She struggled and spat at him. He reached for his cuffs.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Let me try to talk to her.”
Auguste glared at me but went off, muttering.
I went up to the girl and touched her arm lightly. She was only a little older than my oldest daughter. “Hey. Could we just walk downstairs and talk about this outside? If we stay here, everyone’s going to be screaming and yelling, and that’s not going to help anyone. Come on. Let’s just go outside and try to figure this out. Okay?”
“But this is where I live,” the girl said, fresh tears filling her eyes. “My bedroom is there. My things. If you just make her open the door, I can show you. I live here.”
She was sobbing now, raw and brokenhearted, but after a moment she let me lead her down the stairs and out the door.
Once we were outside, Auguste took over again. “All right! Now go! Get! You know you’re not allowed here! I see you over here again I’m gonna bring you in and you can spend the night in a cell!”
The girl sniffled for a second, scowled at Auguste, then spun around and took off around the corner, walking as fast as her four-inch heels would allow.
It was one a.m. I looked at Auguste. “Will she be okay? Should we go after her, maybe call Child and Family Services?”
He snorted. “She’s fine. Leave her. She’ll go to her aunt now. This happens all the time.”
I must have looked doubtful, because he added, “You don’ know this girl like I do. You feel sorry for her, but I’m telling you, she’s trouble. I get so many calls about her. The boys treat her bad and she just lets them. She’s wild. She’s been barred from here and she’s got to leave. Let her go. She’s fine.”
We got back in the scout car and drove slowly out of the project. The girl, half a block ahead, glanced over her shoulder but didn’t slow down. Auguste rolled down his window and stuck his head out as we drove past her slight, lonely figure.
“Good night,” he shouted in a mocking singsong. “I loooove you, sweetheart. Good niiight!”
Not My World
Victim reports on the listed date and time, that he was walking Southbound . . . by the listed location, when he then saw a male on a bicycle riding very fast going Northbound. . . . He then felt immediately after, that he had been shot. Victim stated that he believes he heard someone say, “We hit the wrong guy.”
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
This was not my world.
I grew up in a family of left-wing activists. My parents marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and my mother was a self-described socialist feminist before Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made socialism cool. As a child, I joined my parents on picket lines and at protests. We marched for nuclear disarmament, racial justice, abortion rights, an end to apartheid, and an end to US intervention in Latin America. Later, as a college student, I ran the undergraduate community service organization and taught in a summer program for at-risk high school kids. After a master’s degree in anthropology I went on to law school, where, through the school’s clinical programs, I represented people too poor to pay for legal representation.
After graduating from law schoo
l, I worked as a human rights advocate both in the United States and abroad. When I became a law professor, I taught courses on human rights, international law, and constitutional law, and my academic work was punctuated by two stints in government service: first at the State Department’s human rights bureau in the late 1990s, and again from 2009 to 2011 as an Obama administration appointee at the Defense Department, where I established an office on international humanitarian policy. In between government stints, I supplemented my academic career with a sideline in journalism. I spent four years as a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and four more years writing a weekly column for Foreign Policy, an online magazine. Between my NGO work, journalism, and my government work, I spent time in trouble spots all over the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Indonesia, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Israel, Palestine.
Becoming a police officer was hardly an obvious next step. In the world I inhabited day to day, surrounded by academics, activists, journalists, and policy experts, most people I knew viewed police officers as, at best, witless cogs in a criminal justice machine that exacerbated racial inequities, and at worst, brutal, racist thugs. When I first started thinking about applying to the DC police reserve corps, I tried to imagine how I would tell my friends and family. I pictured myself walking into the faculty lounge at Georgetown Law and informing my colleagues of my plans. I couldn’t imagine what words I could use to explain.
From the beginning, it was my mother’s likely reaction that worried me most. I had always struggled with her expectations: I wanted to please her and make her proud, but at the same time, I didn’t want her choices and commitments to dictate my own.
That balancing act has never been an easy one. With an outsize intellect and an equally outsize personality, my mother wasn’t merely an incidental or part-time activist, combining casual attendance at the occasional rally or protest with a full-time job doing something bourgeois and unrelated. She was, you might say, a professional activist, devoting the whole of her career to organizing for social change. She wrote books about health care reform, feminism, and economic inequality; she served on the boards of groups ranging from the Democratic Socialists of America to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; she founded and, at the age of seventy-nine, still runs a journalism organization called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
