by Rosa Brooks
Burglary: Reporting Party states that an unknown Suspect 1 entered the apartment through the unlocked front door and took the listed items which were located in the common living area.
Burglary: Victim 1 states that she was in the shower at the listed location when she heard Suspect yell “I’m here, where are you guys?” Victim 1 got out of the shower and didn’t see anyone in the apartment. She locked the door and went back into the bathroom. Victim 1 heard someone tugging at the front door again so she went to look through the peephole. Victim 1 observes Suspect running away from the door. When Victim 2 arrived to the listed location, he discovered the listed property missing from his bag that was located inside the listed location sitting in a chair by the table.
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: Defendant was in a verbal altercation with Victim 1 and Victim 2. Defendant struck Victim 1 with his backpack three times. Defendant then struck Victim 2 with a large machete in the left arm area. Multiple citizens restrained Defendant 1 and subdued Defendant until MPD arrived on the scene to secure the area.
Robbery: Complainant 1 reports that while returning to his vehicle he was struck in the back of his head by Suspect. Complainant reports that Suspect held him down, went through his pockets, and took his wallet. Complainant reports that Suspect then fled.
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: Victim reports on the listed date, time, and location he was standing at the corner . . . when he heard a popping noise. Victim then states that after hearing the popping noise he realized he was shot. Victim then states . . . he seen an unknown Suspect running in an unknown direction from the scene.
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: On the listed date and time officers were dispatched to the listed location for a stabbing. . . . Upon arrival officers met with Victim. Victim states he got into a verbal argument after himself and Suspect were drinking. Suspect presented a knife and stabbed Victim in the upper chest area (left side) once. Suspect begins chasing Victim.
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: Officers made contact with Victim, who stated that he was in a verbal altercation with Suspect over money. Victim stated Suspect broke a glass bottle and cut him in the left forearm, causing the listed injuries.
Robbery: On the listed date and time, officers responded to the area for a robbery. . . . Victim was located in front of the listed address unconscious and bleeding from the back of his head. . . . Reporting Party advised that Suspect 1, Suspect 2, Suspect 3 assaulted Victim 1 and went through his pockets before fleeing on foot.
Homicide: Officers received a ShotSpotter alert for sounds of gunshots. . . . Officers canvassed the area and found a [vehicle] with damage to the front end and what appeared to be a bullet hole in the top rear driver’s side. While on scene Officers also located what appeared to be a pool of blood on the ground in front of the vehicle and several shell casings. . . . While on scene Officers were notified of a victim shot in the chest at [the hospital]. The Decedent was [subsequently] pronounced [dead].
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: Officers . . . were dispatched to the sound of gunshots. . . . Upon arrival Officers observed Victim with gunshot wounds to the leg. Officers administered the tourniquet to the left leg of Victim. Witness stated that Suspect was seen with a gun fleeing from the scene.
Robbery: The listed victims report that they were working in a vacant residence located at the listed address, when they were approached by Suspect 1 and Suspect 2. Suspect 1 produced a handgun, pointed it each of the victims in turn, and demanded their property. Suspect 2 collected the listed property from each of the victims. Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 then fled on foot. . . .
Robbery: On the listed date and time and in front of the listed location, Victim reports that as he was waiting for his Lyft passenger inside his vehicle, he was approached by Suspect, who was on a bicycle. Victim reports that suspect rode up alongside his driver’s side window and asked if he was an Uber or Lyft. Victim reports that while talking on his cell phone, he rolled down his window to better understand Suspect. Victim reports that while his window was down, Suspect snatched the listed property out of Victim’s hands. Victim reports that Suspect fled the scene.
Armed Carjacking: Officers are dispatched to scene Armed Carjacking. Upon arrival officers make contact with Victim. After the investigation was conducted it was found that Suspect used a silver handgun to execute the carjacking of Victim. Suspect initially asked for Victim’s wallet and after Victim denied having a wallet, Suspect told Victim to get out of the car.
Sexual Abuse: Complainant disclosed [that] Suspect penetrated her vagina with his penis against her will and without her consent.
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon: Victim advised he was sitting in front of the listed location when he got into a verbal altercation that turned physical with an unknown female. Victim advised [that] the unknown female then stabbed him in his legs.
Robbery: Suspect approached Complainant and displayed a black firearm and told Complainant to give his shit up. Complainant reached in his pockets and gave listed items to Suspect.
Robbery: On the listed date and time at the listed location Complainant got off the Metro bus and was followed by Suspect 1 and Suspect 2. When Complainant noticed Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 following him, he turned around and went the opposite direction. Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 then approached Complainant brandishing the handle of a knife demanding the listed property. Complainant gave Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 the listed property and fled.
Carjacking: On the listed date and time at the listed location Complainant advised she was exiting the listed vehicle when Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 approached the vehicle and said “Get the fuck down!” Complainant then got on the ground and Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 got into the listed vehicle and fled in an unknown direction. . . .
Burglary: Victim 1 and Victim 2 report that they were asleep at the listed residence when unknown suspect/s forced entry into their home between 0400 and 0600 hours through a locked back door by prying the door open with an unknown object. Once inside the location, the unknown suspect/s stole the listed items and exited through the front door.
Bad Choices
Injured Officer: Officer [redacted] injured his right shoulder and right knee while supporting the weight of a prisoner who attempted to hang himself in the cell block. The Officer was transported to the Police and Fire Clinic by MPD. 1130 hours.
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
For the most part, America’s criminal justice system isn’t deliberately cruel. It’s just indifferent to the ways in which it breaks human beings. Few police officers want to contribute to mass incarceration or aid in the destruction of poor minority communities. But the absurdities and injustices are inherent in the system. Often, by the time the police get involved, the only available choices are bad ones.
One night in the spring of 2018, I was patrolling with Lowrey in the Fifth District. The evening had been a fairly peaceful one; we’d had a call reporting an unconscious man on the ground and had hung around while medics administered Narcan for an overdose; we’d mediated between an angry property owner and a woman who kept parking in his private parking lot without permission; we’d checked out a few burglar alarms. We were sitting in the car in a strip mall parking lot after one of the alarm calls, about to call it a night, when I noticed a struggle going on a few hundred feet away. Later, I wished I hadn’t noticed, but by then it was too late.
I gave Lowrey’s arm a quick nudge. “Hey, Lowrey, what’s going on over there?” I pointed. “Looks like the Safeway security guard’s fighting with someone.”
We jumped out of the car and ran over. The uniformed security guard was struggling with a small woman holding a wheeled suitcase. She was trying to run away, and the guard was trying to hold her there. When the woman saw two
MPD officers approaching, she gave up and just stood there waiting, shoulders sagging, head bowed. The guard seized her arm.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
The guard pointed at the suitcase and opened the top compartment. “She stole this stuff from the Safeway.”
I looked into the suitcase. It contained a large container of laundry detergent and a multipack of chicken thighs.
We all walked into the Safeway, and the guard cuffed the shoplifter, who started to cry.
“My grandbaby,” she said. “We ain’t got no food. I ain’t eaten all day.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked the guard. “She’s stealing necessities. This doesn’t seem like a situation where she needs to go to jail.”
The guard, a dreadlocked young black guy, agreed. “She done this before, but yeah, I’m just gonna bar her.”
“Barring” is essentially a formal notice prohibiting someone from entering private property. Once barred, the shoplifter would be subject to immediate arrest for trespassing if she returned, whether or not she stole anything again. It seemed like a reasonable solution, if you could call anything reasonable that was premised on tolerating a society in which some people were reduced to stealing laundry detergent and raw chicken.
It stank. I hadn’t noticed when we were out in the parking lot, but somewhere along the line, the shoplifter had soiled herself. Maybe it was a side effect of whatever drugs she was on; her pupils were dilated and her voice was slurred. Or maybe it was just fear. Either way, she suddenly seemed to become aware of it as well.
“She needs to go to the restroom,” the guard said.
Everyone looked at me. I was the only female officer. “Come on, ma’am, I’ll take you.”
We uncuffed her. I wasn’t worried about her running off. She looked entirely defeated, and in any case, I didn’t think she was going to be arrested, so I couldn’t see any reason to make her use the restroom in handcuffs.
“I’m not . . . I’m not doin’ anything else,” she assured me. “It’s just . . . we ain’t had no food. We got nothing to eat today.”
“Let’s see if we can help you,” I said as we walked toward the restroom in the back of the store. “I think he’s gonna cut you a break. We don’t like seeing people get arrested when they’re hungry. It’s a tough situation.”
She stared at the ground. “What happened was, I did get caught. I’m not gonna lie. I was embarrassed. I got scared and I ran.”
“It’s a tough situation.”
The women’s room was occupied, so I commandeered the men’s room for my prisoner. She washed out her pants in the sink, and it took a while. Finally she declared herself finished, though the room still stank. We walked back to Lowrey and the guard.
This wasn’t going to end too badly, I thought. The shoplifter would get a barring notice, we’d try to steer her toward contacting social services, and I’d give her some cash before we let her go. We weren’t going to solve the myriad problems she was clearly facing in her life, but at least we weren’t going to be making things worse, and she’d be able to buy some food instead of stealing it.
But then things went wrong. While I was taking the shoplifter to the restroom, Lowrey checked to see if the woman had any outstanding warrants.
Procedurally, this was the right thing to do; she had committed a crime, even if we and the store guards were all willing to let her go with a barring notice. Checking for active warrants is considered good practice. It’s not strictly required in such situations, but it’s routinely done and strongly recommended; it would look bad for the department if officers had, say, a homicide suspect in their custody during a traffic stop and simply let him drive off because they didn’t bother to check for warrants. So Lowrey, who was always conscientious, was doing the right thing by checking for warrants. For all we knew, our shoplifter was a serial killer, on the run from multiple murders.
Except she wasn’t a serial killer, of course. In real life, there aren’t many serial killers. There aren’t even that many murderers, statistically speaking, and only a small percentage of violent crimes are committed by women. But our shoplifter did have an outstanding warrant. It wasn’t for anything serious; it was a “failure to appear” warrant from another jurisdiction, which meant only that she had been charged with something in the past, been released pending further proceedings, and had neglected to show up at a scheduled court hearing. Odds were, the underlying offense was something as minor as tonight’s theft of laundry detergent and chicken thighs.
But it was a warrant all the same, and once we knew about it, we no longer had any choice about whether or not to let her go. We had to arrest her.
“Shit,” I said angrily. I was upset. Why had Lowrey checked for warrants? I knew it wasn’t fair, but right then, I wished he hadn’t been such a responsible officer. I didn’t want to arrest this small, sad woman. Her ID said she was a decade younger than I was, but I’d have guessed she was two decades older. Poverty, misery, and drugs had launched her into premature old age.
When we broke the news, she was resigned. We let her call her family and make arrangements. She looked at me pleadingly. “I don’t wanna go to jail in these filthy pants. Please.”
Lowrey and I asked the Safeway guards if they sold sweatpants or any other clothes, but they only had a few souvenir sweatshirts. The best we could do was buy her a big packet of disinfectant wipes. We returned to the restroom and she did her best to clean her clothes more thoroughly. I was glad of this, since I knew I was the one who’d have to conduct a full search before she was transported to the station.
Lowrey and I were both embarrassed by the direction things had taken, and I could tell that Lowrey also wished he hadn’t done a warrant check.
“I’m sorry this is turning out this way,” I told the shoplifter. “I know you’re having a bad day. Hopefully they’ll make it quick. I hope tomorrow will be better.”
“I am having a bad day,” she agreed.
“Next time, if you run out of food,” I said, “call the police station and ask them to help you find places that can provide emergency meals. There are places that do that, okay? We’ll help if we can.”
I hoped this wasn’t a lie. I hoped that if she called the police station and asked for help, the phone would be answered by a decent officer willing to refer her to the right services, and not by some asshole who’d chew her out for wasting police time and then hang up.
I searched her and cuffed her again, and then I put her few personal possessions into a property bag. I turned her phone off so the battery wouldn’t be dead when she got out of jail and tried to turn it on. When her back was turned, I took a twenty out of my wallet and tucked it into the bag containing her property, so she wouldn’t be flat broke when she was released. I listed the twenty dollars on the property inventory as belonging to her.
“That’s nice of you,” the security guard said.
His comment just made me feel worse. I didn’t feel like I was doing something nice. I still felt like I was doing something shitty, and twenty bucks didn’t come close to making up for it.
* * *
• • •
Sometimes, having to arrest someone is a product of well-meaning reforms gone wrong. For instance, Washington, DC, has a mandatory arrest policy for domestic violence. If you have probable cause to believe an assault has taken place in the context of a domestic relationship, you have to arrest the perpetrator. You can’t give a warning or refer the parties to counseling. The mandatory arrest law was initially passed to try to force police to take male-on-female intimate partner violence more seriously. Too often, officers responding to domestic violence calls would essentially turn a blind eye to abusive men, regarding domestic violence as a private matter, or as something too minor to merit an arrest, leaving women at the mercy of their abusive male partners.
But like all efforts
to reduce biased decisions by reducing discretion, the mandatory arrest law had unintended consequences. Over time, domestic relationships were defined more and more broadly, to include all situations in which the parties were related by blood, adoption, or legal custody, as well as situations in which the parties had a child in common, had a former relationship, or shared or had ever shared a mutual residence. This brought physical fights between siblings, housemates, and even former housemates into the ambit of the mandatory arrest laws. Sometimes, physical fights involving siblings or former roommates can be severe and can involve the same dynamics of power and control often seen in intimate partner violence. But just as often, the rigid mandatory arrest requirement leads to outcomes that seem very punitive.
Once, for instance, we were dispatched to a domestic violence call and found that it involved an altercation between two adult sisters.
“I’m going downstairs to go put my clothes in the washing machine,” explained the injured sister. “She got mad because I guess her clothes ain’t got dry or whatever. She came to me and hit me in my face; I have this mark right here!”
She did have a bruise on her cheek, and her sister admitted hitting her. Under the law, it was a clear-cut case: the parties were in a domestic relationship, one assaulted the other, and that was that. Still, it didn’t seem like the crime of the century. Both sisters agreed that violence between them was not the norm; this had never happened before. Things had just gotten unusually tense—the older sister was a nurse and was upset because her younger sister took her uniforms out of the laundry before they were dry, right when she was supposed to be heading off to work in a clean, dry uniform. Both sisters had young children and lived with their mother. Arresting the older sister would require her family to take care of her children and would prevent her from going to work.
