Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  It was inefficient and potentially dangerous. On another of my early patrol shifts, my partner and I responded to a domestic violence call. It was an unseasonably warm fall afternoon, and we arrived to find ourselves at a backyard barbecue. At least fifteen guests were milling around, as were the victim and the alleged perpetrator, and everyone was talking at once, most corroborating the complainant’s version of events, but a few taking the perpetrator’s side. Within minutes of our arrival, half a dozen other officers arrived, adding to the crowd. Several witnesses began an enthusiastic and slightly tipsy reenactment of the assault to illustrate the sequence of events, which had reportedly involved the victim being slammed against the porch door by her boyfriend, and, perhaps, the boyfriend being subsequently hit on the head with a mop handle by a now-absent third party. At some point during the chaotic reenactment, the alleged perpetrator simply walked out the front door and down the street, unhindered by the group of officers standing chatting on the front porch. (Fortunately, he didn’t get far; we arrested him halfway up the block.)

  Much of the time, however, patrolling involved a whole lot of nothing much. You drove around in circles, waiting for something interesting to happen. Especially in the early part of the afternoon, the radio would often go quiet. You’d head over to the 7-Eleven to get a cup of coffee, stopping to shoot the shit with any other officers who had also decided to spend some quality time in the convenience store parking lot. (Since the Seventh District’s 7-Elevens were constantly getting robbed, their employees were usually happy to have a few cop cars visible in the parking lot.) You’d drive around some more, poking the scout car into back alleys and empty lots to see if any bad guys were hanging around. Mostly they weren’t, or if they were, they sensibly went somewhere else when they saw a police car roll up.

  I soon grew accustomed to certain kinds of recurring situations. Calls reporting disorderly conduct came in constantly, for instance, but rarely amounted to much. When you got a call for disorderly conduct—people yelling in the stairwell, kids standing around on the corner hassling passersby, a noisy party—you had to go check it out, but you knew it would probably come to nothing. Either the disorder would be nowhere in sight when you pulled up—the perpetrators having vanished, or turned orderly—or they would be doing something that didn’t in fact constitute a crime, and we would have to explain to the complainant that standing in a group on the corner or playing music at a party does not constitute an arrestable offense. Sometimes we’d go talk to the partygoers or the guys on the corner, just to let them know their neighbors were complaining. Sometimes they’d curse and tell us their neighbors were busybodies, but generally they’d turn down the music or agree to go hang out somewhere else. Only rarely did those calls turn into something more serious.

  Cops viewed these as “bullshit calls.” You’d respond to a call reporting some kids setting a fire on the sidewalk; you’d arrive and find nothing but a small pile of ash. You’d get a call about a family disturbance, but when you located the address, no one would answer the door and you’d find that the person who called 911 hadn’t left a callback number. You’d be dispatched to a convenience store to take a shoplifting report, but the shoplifter would be long gone, and had in any case only stolen a can of soda, so you’d look at the security camera footage, make a few desultory turns around the block in search of your suspect, and shrug apologetically to the frustrated store owner. A woman would call to complain that drug dealers kept hanging around in front of her house, leaning on her fence and dropping their trash in her yard, and you’d have to explain that there wasn’t much you could do unless you caught the litterers in the act, and even then, you weren’t going to haul someone off to jail for dropping a candy wrapper on someone’s lawn. Not in 7D, anyway.

  Like most poor minority neighborhoods, 7D was in many ways over-policed—unlike in more affluent areas, police are a constant and visible presence. Activists critical of policing complain, with some justification, that police effectively become occupying forces in poor urban neighborhoods. You can’t walk for more than a few minutes in 7D without seeing a police car, or two, or three, and when there are more police, there are also more enforcement actions and arrests, further fueling race- and wealth-based disparities.

  But over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand—police go where people ask them to go. To put it a little differently: Police don’t operate in a vacuum. They are paid by taxpayer dollars; they respond to the directives and incentives created by national, state, and municipal laws, policies, and political pressures; and in a day-to-day sense, they respond to whatever calls happen to come in over the 911 lines, whether those calls involve complaints about armed robberies or about disorderly conduct.

  In recent years, videos shared on social media have drawn national attention to the implicit racial bias that too often leads white Americans to call the cops on black people engaged in innocuous activities, such as barbecuing in public parks, napping in a university dorm lounge, entering their own apartment buildings, or sitting at a Starbucks table without first placing an order. Such bias-driven calls are all too common, especially in demographically changing neighborhoods. They demonstrate the durability of destructive racial stereotypes, waste police resources, and leave people of color feeling harassed and frustrated, knowing that even the most innocent activities may generate hostile scrutiny. But the over-policing of poor black urban communities is also fueled by high demand for police services from members of those same communities. When other social goods and services are absent or scarce, police become the default solution to an astonishingly wide range of problems.

  In 7D, overreliance on police services meant constant 911 calls for minor issues. People called the police because their neighbor’s TV was too loud, their daughter was sassing them, or they smelled marijuana on the street. They called 911 to report that the kids from down the block kept leaving their bikes in the middle of the sidewalk, the boys on the corner were being disrespectful, or their sister took their favorite scarf without permission. And, of course, there were complaints from the truly mentally ill, who called to report nonexistent crimes and alien abductions. But it didn’t matter how trivial or nonsensical the complaint was. When people called 911, the police responded, every time.

  I didn’t mind the bullshit calls. They were more interesting than sitting around in the 7-Eleven parking lot. In general, I didn’t much want to lock people up, but I enjoyed talking to people—even crazy people, lonely people, and people incapable of handling the minor conflicts that are a normal part of life. Many officers complain about having to serve as social workers, mediating family disputes and dealing with people who mostly need parenting classes, drug rehab, or psychiatric care, not police intervention. But though I was keenly aware of the downside of treating police as default problem solvers, I enjoyed the social-work aspect of the job.

  Sometimes, the silly things made you feel useful. One cold evening in February 2017, I was patrolling with Ben. We were stopped at a red light when I noticed that the woman in the car next to us was screaming. I rolled down my window.

  “Oh my God oh my God!” shrieked the woman. She lifted both hands off the steering wheel. “Oh God oh God!”

  “Ma’am,” I called. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh God oh God there’s a spider in my car. Oh God help me.” She was hyperventilating.

  Ben and I looked at each other. Then Ben hit the blue lights and we both jumped out of the car.

  “Ma’am, just come on out of your car,” I said. “My partner here is going to take care of that spider.”

  Ben scowled at me. I smiled sweetly. “I’m scared of spiders too.”

  Still repeating, “Oh my God oh my God,” the woman opened her door and leapt out. Around us, the traffic roared by.

  Ben leaned into the car. “Where is it?”

  “Oh God. It’s enormous. Huge. Can’t you see it?”


  “Oh, got it, there it is. Actually, well, it’s pretty small.” Ben swatted the spider with a tissue. “Okay, ma’am. The spider is gone.”

  “Oh, bless you, officers, bless you, and thank you so much!”

  All smiles now, she jumped back into her car.

  Back in our own car, Ben looked at me. “Well, that was a first.”

  High Visibility Patrol. Other item of note: Units observed a female having a panic attack in the middle of Bladensburg Road NE due to a spider on the inside of her windshield. Officers removed a spider from woman’s car in traffic and she was very relieved.

  —MPD Reserve Corps Newsletter

  Mothers and Daughters

  Assault with a Dangerous Weapon (Other)—At the listed date, time Complainant reports to MPD [that she and] Suspect who is Complainant’s daughter were involved in a verbal argument that quickly escalated to Suspect pushing Complainant into a table causing Complainant to fall to the ground . . . at which point Suspect picked up a dumbbell and struck Complainant in the face causing the listed injuries.

  —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

  One night in the late spring of 2017, we were dispatched to take a missing persons report after a women called 911 to say that her daughter had vanished.

  “Oh no, fuck!” my partner moaned. “I fucking hate missing persons! This is going to be such a fucking time suck.”

  No one liked missing persons calls, and this one did seem like a stinker: a sixteen-year-old-girl, missing for several hours. Bad things could happen to missing girls.

  There had been a recent missing persons scandal in DC. Local media had noted the high number of police department reports involving missing girls, almost all African American, and for a few weeks, this fueled a social media furor: there was an epidemic of missing girls in DC, activists declared, but because they were dark-skinned, the authorities didn’t take their cases seriously and didn’t bother to look for them.

  The story presented by the media was not entirely accurate. Although more than two thousand missing children and teens were reported missing in DC each year, virtually all of them were quickly located. Many had gone off of their own accord, for reasons of their own, and soon returned home. They were not always promptly removed from the list of missing persons, however, because their families sometimes forgot to let the police know they were back, and police officers sometimes forgot to update the records. The vast majority of children reported missing had not mysteriously vanished or been abducted; they simply were not where they were supposed to be. Sometimes, that was because they hated the places they were supposed to be, and for good reason; many missing children were hiding from abusive caregivers or trying to avoid miserable, overcrowded homes.

  Other times, they were just acting like kids.

  On one of my patrol shifts, for instance, an eight-year-old boy was reported missing by his mother when he disobeyed her directive not to ride his skateboard in the street; wriggling out of her grip, he managed to grab his skateboard and tear off. The mother was holding a baby in an infant seat and couldn’t effectively give chase, so she called the police and reported her son missing.

  With mother and baby in the back seat of the patrol car, we drove slowly all over the neighborhood, searching for the young absconder. His mother finally spotted him near a park, skateboarding energetically down the middle of the road. We pulled up alongside and his mother called his name. The boy glanced at us, scowled, and skated even faster, but my partner for the evening, a fit young guy in his twenties, jumped out of the car and tackled him, grabbing him around the waist and hoisting him right off the ground. The boy’s feet kicked frantically at the air, but my partner held him firmly off the pavement, then stuffed him unceremoniously into the car next to his mother. I retrieved the skateboard and added it to the now-crowded back seat. The boy was snuffling and bawling, and his mother was threatening him and his skateboard with dire consequences.

  We ended up driving them all the way back to her parents’ place in a Maryland suburb, getting lost several times along the way, the boy now silent and pouting, his mother loquacious with relief but seemingly unable to recall her parents’ address with any certainty. We passed strip malls and made U-turns in a dozen culs-de-sac, the mother squinting at house after house. “I think it’s just down that street there . . . no, wait, maybe the next one?” Finally, she spotted a house that appeared to satisfy her, so we let the whole crew off in the driveway, and they vanished inside.

  This was an easy one, since the missing boy was found quickly enough to cancel the “missing” designation. But a missing sixteen-year-old girl sounded more troubling, and at first I was taken aback by my partner’s cavalier dismissal.

  My partner that spring evening was a female officer from Puerto Rico. Like me, she was an older office with teens at home, and I liked her lilting Spanish accent, her empathy, and her calm, no-nonsense attitude toward the macho antics of our younger male colleagues.

  Seeing my raised brows, she said, “Yeah, right, maybe this girl got kidnapped by a pedophile. But not very likely. I bet this is gonna be bullshit. Just wait.”

  She was right. When we arrived at the missing girl’s home, it was clear that her mother was furious, not frightened.

  “I told her, Kenisha, you ain’t leaving this house! I said, you grounded!” she fumed. “So I go out to the store, I got errands, she supposed to be staying here doing homework, she got a math test tomorrow. But I come home from the store and she gone. She out of control.”

  “So . . . you reported her missing, Ms. Watkins?”

  She harrumphed. “Yes, she missing! She missing from where I told her she got to be, which is right here. So you got to go find her. You got to find her right now.”

  “Are you worried about her safety?” Just because there was no reason to think the girl had been abducted didn’t mean she couldn’t be in danger. A teen who was fighting with her mother might be angry, depressed, vulnerable to exploitation, even suicidal.

  Ms. Watkins snorted derisively. “Oh no. She just acting out. She probably in the park with them friends of hers. She always going there. You just got to go look for her. And when you find her,” she added ominously, “I want you to take her jail. She need to be taught a lesson about listening to her mother. I tell her to stay put, she need to stay put.”

  All the same, our sergeant insisted that we go through the standard missing persons drill, calling friends, neighbors, classmates, teachers, local hospitals. We sat in the parked scout car, me making calls, my partner—vindicated by the manifest ridiculousness of our quest—watching videos on her phone. I called the girl’s friends and teachers; I checked to make sure she hadn’t been arrested or taken into the custody of Child and Family Services; I called local hospitals; I even called the morgue to see if any unidentified adolescent female bodies had turned up. Meanwhile, other patrol cars were provided with the girl’s description and instructed to drive around looking for her, particularly in the park where her mother claimed she often hung out.

  “This is dumb,” I finally admitted. “This girl’s not really missing. She’s just a teenager who ignored her mom and went out with friends.”

  “You got it. That’s how MPD works,” my partner agreed, not looking up from her phone. “Gotta look like we’re doing something even when everyone knows there’s no point and the kid will be home tomorrow.”

  Two hours later, finally finished with the long list of calls (which were, unsurprisingly, fruitless), I left my partner to her movie and went back and knocked on Ms. Watkins’s door.

  She looked surprised to see me.

  “Ms. Watkins,” I said dutifully, “I just wanted to let you know that we don’t have any additional information yet, but we’re looking all over, and the minute we find out anything, we’ll let you know.”

  “Oh, she’s back!” />
  “She’s back?”

  “I’m sorry, officer, I meant to call you, but I got so busy yelling at her, I forgot. She come back about an hour ago.”

  She gestured at a sulky-looking teen sitting on the sofa.

  “You gonna arrest her now? I’m sick and tired of this. She won’t mind me. Night in jail would do her a world of good.”

  “Ma’am, she hasn’t committed any crime. Going out when you told her not to isn’t a thing we can lock her up for.”

  “Oh . . .” Ms. Watkins looked disappointed. “Okay, I got you. Okay. Can you at least talk to her, try to scare her a bit?” She was suddenly plaintive, an exhausted, worried mother rather than an angry mother.

  “I know I sound harsh, but she getting wild; she don’t listen. She don’t understand that I worry about her. This a hard city, you know? She keep up like this, disobeying me, failing math, going with them drug boys, she end up making a mess of her life. Her sister, she an addict. I want better for Kenisha. Maybe you can scare some sense into her.”

  “I’d be happy to talk to her.” I wasn’t going to try to scare the girl, and I didn’t have much hope I’d be able to persuade her to listen to her mother, but maybe Ms. Watkins was right; maybe a uniformed police officer would have some influence.

  I went over to the girl and sat down on a chair so I was facing her. Her hair was dyed a vibrant blue, she had multiple nose rings, and her mouth was set in an expression of mulish teen stubbornness.

  “Kenisha, look,” I began. “Your mom got really worried about you. I know maybe it seems like she was just mad, but she was so worried about you she called us and reported you missing, because she thought you might be in real danger.”

  Kenisha gave this the eye roll it deserved.

  I tried again. “I’m not kidding. She was really worried about you, and we were too. We had police all over the neighborhood, searching for you. We called every hospital in the city in case you got into some kind of bad accident and were lying there hurt or unconscious. We even called the morgue to make sure you weren’t lying there dead on a slab.”