by Rosa Brooks
There was special software that allowed this to be done electronically, with a lot of clicking and dragging. You’d draw the road, click and drag tiny cars into place, and add whatever embellishments were required. You could click on tiny stop signs and speed limit signs and drag them into place, or add a tree, a motorcycle, or a small explosion icon to your diagram. For some reason, there was also an icon that appeared to depict a llama. No one was ever able to explain why the software designers had included a llama as an optional traffic accident icon, but because everyone liked it, quite a few accident diagrams included a tiny llama somewhere in the frame. It took forever to get the diagrams just right, and often they’d be bounced back by sergeants demanding additional details, or the deletion of a stray llama.
I was okay with traffic accidents. They were complicated, but they offered a window into the many forms of expertise it takes to keep a city going: police, medics, firefighters, 911 dispatchers, tow truck drivers, road repair crews, crews to fix damaged signs and streetlights. Sometimes it was like being a child again, or like living inside a Richard Scarry picture book: What Do People Do All Day? Or Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (not to mention A Day at the Police Station).
One night, my partner and I responded to a one-car accident on the Suitland Parkway. A guy had driven his car off the road and into a ditch. He was drunk but had somehow walked away without a scratch. His car wasn’t as fortunate—it was nose-down in the ditch, tail end sticking up almost vertically, and bits and pieces of the car were scattered across the highway for a hundred yards. Another officer took the drunk guy off to the station for booking, and my partner and I set up flares and waited for the tow truck (or, in DC parlance, the tow crane). When the tow truck arrived, we had to shut down the parkway’s westbound lanes altogether, since the tow truck needed to back into the traffic lanes while pulling the car from the ditch.
I am shutting down a highway, I thought. What a strange thing to be doing! I went over to speak to the drivers of the first few cars to explain what was going on, and though no one was very pleased about being stuck on Suitland Parkway at midnight, they were pretty polite about it. After that, I went back to watch the tow crane guy at work.
His job looked nearly impossible: pulling an almost vertical car out of a ditch and onto the flat bed of his truck. But he knew just what to do. He dashed around and attached hooks here and chains there, and within ten minutes, the damaged vehicle had been pulled, creaking and groaning, onto the truck. So that’s how you do it, I thought. It was a minor miracle—the kind that happens a hundred times a day in every city but is usually invisible.
Other times, of course, the secret city revealed itself as less benign—more Dickens than Richard Scarry.
Half a mile from the White House and the offices of the high-priced lawyers and lobbyists, there’s a guy passed out on the sidewalk, almost dead from fentanyl-laced heroin. On the next block over, there’s a woman screaming, running away from the man trying to slam her head into the wall. Across the street, there are four kids in a one-bedroom apartment, their mother too high to remember to buy food. The kids get by on a mix of school-provided lunches and petty shoplifting—a bag of chips here, a can of soda there.
Here’s the ugliest, most Dickensian thing of all: If my colleagues and I catch them, those shoplifting kids might end up in handcuffs. If we catch them several times in a row, odds are they’ll spend much of their adult lives in a cage.
Cages
Burglary: On today’s date between the given times, MPD received a 911 call for a Burglary in progress. Upon arriving on the scene, MPD was met by witnesses who . . . pointed Officers to the room where Defendant was hiding. Defendant was placed under arrest for Burglary 1. While in police custody, Defendant on multiple occasions flashed his penis to MPD staff. Defendant also poked his penis through the cell block doors and proceeded to masturbate in front of MPD staff. Soon after doing that, Defendant was placed inside a closed door cell where he broke a water pipe, causing a flood in the cell block.
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
You can call them cells if you want, but cages is what they are. Most cops prefer other words, because they don’t see themselves as people who put humans into cages. Ask a dozen police officers what made them go into law enforcement and most will tell you they wanted to help people. Many of the officers I got to know in DC had been crime victims themselves at some point in their lives, or were close to someone who’d been a victim; stories about mothers, sisters, or brothers who were mugged, beaten, stabbed, or shot were common. A few credited positive encounters with a police officer as having changed their lives. It’s a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they reflect common experiences, and I’ve had more than one young officer tell me, eyes wide with emotion, that he would have ended up in prison instead of wearing a badge if Officer So-and-So hadn’t shown interest and compassion at a crucial moment in his life.
What research exists on the reasons people choose law enforcement careers bears this out: in both older and more recent studies, police officers tend to rate the opportunity to help people as the single largest factor in choosing their job; pay, power, and authority are near the bottom of the list.
True, some people are attracted to law enforcement because they’re bullies who like the idea of having a badge, a gun, and a license to order people around. I have met a few officers like that—those who gleefully arrest kids for stealing candy bars and have no qualms about locking up a single mother for driving to work on a suspended license—but they aren’t common, and they tend to be disliked by their peers. The vast majority of the police officers I met in my time with MPD were decent, well-intentioned men and women.
Policing tends to attract practical people with little patience for ambiguity, and it’s probably fair to say that the average officer is not much given to pondering abstractions about crime, guilt, and the nature of society. But the best officers—and I met many excellent ones—combine practicality with a willingness to seek solutions that seem compassionate and just, rather than merely expedient.
And contrary to popular belief, cops don’t spend a high percentage of their time putting people into cages. In 2017, 3,837 sworn MPD officers made a total of 34,136 arrests. That’s a lot of arrests, but for each individual officer, it averages out to fewer than nine arrests per year. Granted, arrests are not distributed evenly. Some officers serve as station clerks or are assigned to headquarters and may make no arrests at all in a given year, while others, particularly those assigned to a Gun Recovery Unit or one of the city’s Crime Suppression Units, may make far more arrests than typical patrol officers. But these differences come out in the wash; a typical full-time patrol officer will average well under one arrest each month.
For better or for worse, police officers spend most of their time serving as medics, mediators, and monitors. They break up fights, shoo away aggressive panhandlers, write accident reports, search for missing persons, take sick people to the hospital, encourage abuse victims to seek protective orders, respond to burglar alarms, and do a dozen other things that don’t generate arrests.
But sometimes, police officers do put people in cages.
It is possible to say this in a nicer, more euphemistic way: sometimes, police officers arrest those whom they have probable cause to believe have violated one or more criminal laws. But we should be clear just what it is we are talking about. In the United States, arresting people involves locking them behind metal bars, and this is an inescapable part of what police officers do. It is entirely possible to be a police officer who rarely arrests people, and I know many officers who go far out of their way to avoid arresting people for minor offenses. But there is no way to be a police officer who never arrests people. If you are a police officer, sooner or later you will put another human being into a cage.
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nbsp; Here’s what happens when you get arrested. First, your arms are locked together behind your back with metal cuffs. If you don’t cooperatively place your hands behind your back when told to do so, police officers will yank your arms behind your back, and they won’t hesitate to cause some pain while they’re doing so; if you resist being handcuffed, “control holds” and nonlethal force are in order.
Then you’re searched. The first time, you’re searched by one of the arresting officers. It’s not a strip search, but it’s plenty intrusive. The searching officer goes through your pockets and, if they’re doing their job properly, runs their hands over every inch of your body, including your private parts. If the searching officer feels anything untoward—a weapon, or a baggie containing drugs—they may search inside your clothes as well as outside. They take your shoes off and search inside, and do the same with hats, gloves, jackets. All your personal possessions, including belts, shoelaces, and jewelry, are removed and bagged.
If the arresting officers aren’t driving a transport car, you then stand or sit around for a while, waiting for the wagon to arrive. Everyone who passes by stares at you, and if you’re arrested at home, your family and your neighbors watch you standing there in cuffs. When the wagon finally shows up, the driver searches you all over again, and then you find yourself sitting on a hard metal bench seat in the back of a van on the way to the police station. No windows, no cup holders, no iPhone chargers, just a metal seat.
At the station, you’re searched a third time by the booking officer, and you’re put in a holding cell. Everything’s made of metal: bunks, toilet, sink. There’s no privacy; anyone walking by can see into your cell. And there are no comforts—no blankets, no pillows. No phone, no TV, no books or magazines. You can stare at the wall, or yell at the cell-block officer, or try to nap, but there’s nothing else to do. You might have the luxury of a cell to yourself, but if it’s a busy night, probably not.
After a while you’ll be put back in the wagon and brought over to the city’s Central Cell Block. Here, it’s more of the same. If you’re lucky and got arrested on a weekday morning, you could be arraigned within a few hours. If you’re not so lucky and got yourself arrested on a Saturday night, you’ll be spending a couple of nights in jail before you’re brought before a judge.
Luck also plays a role at the next stage of the proceedings. If your crime was minor and your record is clean or reasonably clean, or if the arresting officer was sloppy and wrote a report that prosecutors find lacking, you may simply be released; prosecutors don’t even bother to pursue many cases. Even if they plan to go forward, you’ll probably be released and given a date to reappear. In DC, only a small fraction of arrestees are detained for more than a few days pending trial, and no one is detained as a result of inability to pay bail. In this sense, DC has a remarkably progressive approach to pretrial detention; only those charged with the most serious offenses are held.
If you’re released, you get your possessions back and you get to go home, assuming you have enough money for transportation, or your phone has enough juice to call someone for a ride. But don’t imagine your problems are now over. Your employer may be angry that you missed work while you were cooling your heels in jail; depending on the employer, you may find you no longer have a job. At a minimum, you’ve probably lost a day or two’s wages, and you now have an arrest on your record. If charges weren’t dismissed, you’ll have to go back to court, which will mean missing more work.
You’ll probably be offered a plea deal, and your lawyer (most likely court-appointed, if you’re the average arrestee, which is to say poor) will probably urge you to take it. Here again, if you’re lucky, there will be no prison time involved, just probation, community service, or payment of fines or restitution. But if you’re poor, paying fines may be impossible, and finding the time for community service—and getting transportation to the place where you’re supposed to undertake it—may be difficult or impossible, which may mean you fail to meet your release conditions, which may, in turn, make you subject to rearrest.
By now you have a criminal conviction on your record, which makes it harder to get a job and access certain other services. Here too, DC is relatively progressive: in 2014, the city council passed legislation prohibiting employers from asking about criminal records prior to making conditional employment offers. But the law is regularly flouted, and in practice, even a misdemeanor on your record may make it tougher to get a job or be admitted to educational programs.
If you end up serving time, things get even worse, both for you and for your family. If you had a job, you don’t have one anymore, and any family members who depend on your income are out of luck. If you have children, they’re now missing a parent, and studies suggest that children with an incarcerated parent are six times more likely to end up incarcerated themselves, compared to children whose parents stay out of prison. They’re also more likely to suffer from emotional and behavior problems, and if your imprisonment leaves them without a responsible parent or guardian, they’ll end up in the care of Children and Family Services, which means placement with a foster family or in a group home, both of which increase their odds of getting subsequently involved in the criminal justice system. If they run away from a court-ordered placement, they can be arrested for absconding. And if their behavior lands them in juvenile detention, this also ups their chances of finding themselves incarcerated as adults: 40 percent of kids in juvenile detention are incarcerated again by the age of twenty-five.
Even when you’re released, your troubles aren’t over. Your criminal record will make housing and gainful employment a challenge, and the odds won’t be in your favor—once you’ve served time, you’ll probably serve more time. A recent Justice Department study found that 68 percent of released prisoners had been rearrested within three years, and a whopping 83 percent had been rearrested within nine years. Maybe your difficulties finding a job will drive you back to crime, but you may also find that the conditions of your release carry the seeds of re-incarceration with them: nearly 30 percent of prison admissions are for acts that are not inherently criminal, but that involve technical parole violations (such as failure to check in with a parole officer at the appointed time, changing residences without permission, failure to complete mandatory programming, etc.).
So try hard not to get arrested. Especially for the poor and for people of color, getting arrested is like getting sucked into a lethal riptide: You might be tossed back out again and find yourself washed up on the sand, bruised and frightened but essentially unharmed. But most of the time, the tidal pull of the criminal justice system drags you farther and farther away from shore, and you drown.
Baked into the System
On the listed date and time, at the listed location, MPD responded for a call for theft of property. . . . Victim reported that Defendant had been inside of the store buying a slurpee. Victim stated that Defendant handed him $2.00 to pay for the slurpee, which was $1.86.
Victim reported that when the cash register opened Defendant reached over the counter and into the cash register and grabbed a handful of U.S. currency. Victim was able to grab some of the U.S. currency back out of Defendant’s hand.
Victim then yelled to Witness, who was outside, and told him to keep the door closed. . . . Defendant never made it outside of the store and officers pulled on scene shortly after. . . . Defendant was placed under arrest for Attempt Robbery of an Establishment.
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
Washington, DC, is a small city, but it has lots and lots of cops. The Metropolitan Police Department alone has about 3,800 sworn officers, for a ratio of roughly 55 MPD officers per 10,000 DC residents. In contrast, New York City has about 42 cops per 10,000 people, Atlanta has 39, and Dallas and Los Angeles have about 25, giving DC one of the highest ratios of police to residents of any large American city. And MPD officers are only part of t
he story. DC also has the US Park Police, with jurisdiction over the National Mall, the monuments, and the vast expanse of Rock Creek Park. It has the Secret Service Uniformed Division guarding the White House, the Vice President’s house, and foreign embassies. There are Metro Transit police, housing authority police, the US Capitol Police, FBI agents, and more than a dozen other police forces with limited jurisdiction, including Amtrak police, Supreme Court police, and even Bureau of Engraving and Printing police.
Having all those cops around doesn’t necessarily reduce crime, but it does ensure that lots of people get arrested. In 2017, 31,560 adults and 2,576 juveniles were arrested by MPD, and other law enforcement agencies in the city arrested an additional 19,054 people, mostly adults, bringing the total number of annual arrests in DC up to 53,090. (If that number doesn’t seem large, remember that Washington has a total population of less than 700,000. In New York, a city with a population of more than 8.6 million, police arrested just 239,064 people in 2017.) The high DC arrest rate ensures a high incarceration rate. In 2018, for instance, 7,654 DC residents were in local and federal prisons, giving DC one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the country, in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The criminal justice system doesn’t affect all DC residents in the same way. A 2019 ACLU report found that 86 percent of those arrested by MPD were black, while black residents make up just 47 percent of the city’s population. Nationwide, minorities, and particularly African Americans, are also stopped by police and arrested at rates disproportionate to their representation in the US population. Black Americans are also more likely to be convicted if arrested, and more likely to receive a harsh sentence than white Americans convicted of the same offenses. Overall, black men have a one-in-three chance of landing in prison at some point in their lives, while white men have only a one-in-seventeen chance. African Americans make up just 13 percent of the overall US population, but they constitute 40 percent of US prisoners.
