by Reggie Yates
Watching such behaviour play out from the perspective of an officer, I could see how paranoia and fear from either the cop or civilian might escalate a situation in a matter of seconds. These young officers would be stopping cars for the rest of their careers, so to be reminded of that good old second amendment (the right to bear arms) and the chances of routine spiralling into a fire fight made sense. I left hoping the focus of the lesson ultimately wouldn’t be how to handle gunfire, but more how to manage conflict.
In theory, the training should make officers’ interactions with the predominantly black community better. Right? Well, in 2014, the city of Ferguson spent four times more money on police uniforms than police training. In one year alone, of the reported 11,000 traffic violations, nine out of ten were involving African-Americans. If the cops made the assumption that who they stop will be armed and dangerous, what would that realistically mean for the average black man or woman in Ferguson?
The continued hostility and anger in the community wouldn’t make the jobs of the newly graduated officers easy, but would they be ready? Just how possible is it to be new to policing and do your job without bias in an environment where divisions are so visible?
I had hope for the rookies as they were on the verge of a career. My hope was tied to them using their power on the street properly, but given the licence to be whoever you choose when walking with a badge and a gun, who knew who they might become?
That’s why I don’t sag
I had an appointment booked with a young and white political activist and human rights lawyer Brendan Roediger. His building and offices felt incredibly corporate, but this was a young guy who put his beliefs front and centre, joining the Ferguson protests and helping those who ended up behind bars.
Lean and baby-faced, his oversized suit made him look a little like a kid playing dress-up, but the minute he got going it was clear Brendan wasn’t for the games. A firm handshake and warm greeting set the tone for what would be a friendly and informal chat, bowed by an unrelenting weight of heartbreaking facts. It was unnerving being sat in the uncomfortable client chair, but Brendan quickly showed himself to be quite the opposite of the quintessential suit, not just in his instant short hand, but also his attitude.
Describing the relationship between the police and African-Americans as one of distrust, his belief was the relationship couldn’t be anything but. He explained that his experience had proven that the police were looking for ways to begin interactions leading to citations. Brendan believed that money played an unhealthy part in the equation: ‘The police operate for profit.’ This was an entirely new concept, and my motor mouth was suddenly out of order as I listened utterly stunned.
At the time of filming, St Louis based many of its municipal budgets on fining the residents of the municipality. Up to 60 per cent of any one area’s budget would come from fines, primarily those issued for traffic violations. Brendan went on to explain that increasingly new laws were being created with an indisputable racial bias.
There was a sagging pants violation (wearing one’s trousers below the waist line), a manner of walking violation and recently walking in a group had become a finable offence also. These new laws carried a $200 fine and felt like an unbelievably obvious attempt to specifically punish young black men. With such laws in place, distrust between black neighbourhoods and the predominantly white police force were at an all-time high.
As a legal aid worker, Brendan spent the lion’s share of his time defending poor people on minor offences in court. He allowed me to ride along to see exactly what he did and who he’d be defending. As we walked from the office block to his car, I noticed my jeans were sagging a little low. I didn’t have a belt on that day and was a fair bit heavier in 2014, so wearing my clothes baggy was my best tactic. Sue me.
I raised my T-shirt to show Brendon just how low my denim had dropped and he confirmed a watching police officer probably would have stopped and fined me.
Things became all the more serious as soon as he explained what would happen to me as a consequence. ‘If you missed your court date because you didn’t have enough money to make the payment, you’d go to jail.’ I checked my pockets and I didn’t have enough to buy my way out of jail. Brendan found it hilarious, dropping a very dry ‘That’s why I don’t sag.’
Brendan believed the system in place took advantage of African-Americans, intentionally. Describing systemic racism as being a fixture since the country’s inception, he believed the lawmakers were continually finding new ways to execute bias. In St Louis County there were ninety municipalities, some of which shared their services. So for the ninety small boroughs – if you will – according to Brendan, there were a whopping fifty-six different police departments.
Depending on the time of year, the majority of those municipalities would hold their own part-time court. This meant a judge would come out once or twice a month for a giant docket to work through a long list of minor cases. With there being so many cases and so few courts, the venue would be determined by availability, meaning court could take place anywhere from an official building to a school gym.
Cases like unkempt lawns with high grass, speeding tickets and sagging pants would dominate the cases heard. For Brendan, it was common to go to a 90-per-cent African-American town where judge, prosecutor, clerk and police officers in court were white and every defendant would be black. In terms of optics, he described it as looking like Apartheid South Africa.
We arrived and I couldn’t help but be saddened by the jammed parking lot. There were few spaces as so many people had already arrived to face the judge. The venue for court was a middle-school gym and the queue to be seen ended in the entrance. Brendan was representing a young black man who had traffic violations to clear.
Many people had showed up without legal representation. According to Brendan, that, by and large, would be because they couldn’t afford one. We said our goodbyes as Brendan went in; I decided to stick around in the parking lot to take everything in. So much of what he’d delivered so matter of fact was only really hitting home as I had a moment of calm to take it all in. Slouched against the crew car, my moment of quiet was repeatedly interrupted by cars pulling up to park as residents hopped out to see the judge. In the half an hour I waited, every single person I saw arriving for court was black.
With the majority of the older white community in Ferguson subscribing to the ‘you commit the crime, you deserve the punishment’ ideal, if what I was seeing first-hand at the court was to be believed, the only people committing crimes were black.
This was America with a black president, but also with a systemic racial bias. To see an entire law enforcement system weighted heavily against its black citizens left me pondering a core question, how possible is it for a predominantly black community to be policed by a predominantly white police force?
When race and power collide, you have an issue
I reconnected with Clifton who answered my cries for help as I was in desperate need of a haircut. Walking me into a popular local barbershop, we could have been with Max in Jowas barbershop in Peckham. As expected, chat was constant and debate was rife. A chair was dusted down and my inner tart was praying I wouldn’t get butchered by hair clippers on camera. It didn’t take long for the chatty barbers to find out exactly what it was I was shooting and quickly the entire shop was involved in the conversation.
Clifton spoke of a desire for change at an operational level. He wanted the police to change the way they did things: ‘When race and power collide, you have an issue.’ I asked the entire shop if ever they found themselves in trouble would they call the police? A resounding and powerful ‘NO!’ came back from barbers, customers, fathers and sons.
Quietly listening while making a good job of my trim, my barber interjected to provide a little context: ‘Not all police officers are bad, but a lot of them do abuse their authority.’ Citing a diminished feeling of safety around the police, she continued, ‘I can show you thirty, forty
kids with guns.’ Clifton spoke to the bigger issue of guns in the neighbourhood. He explained how much easier it was to acquire a gun than it was to register to vote or have access to higher education.
Another barber brought up guns and opened the can of worms that was the second amendment. I’m not a fan of guns at all but if I were living in America, I honestly don’t know what I’d do. ‘Somebody come in your house with a gun – would you lay down or fight?’ I hadn’t thought about the realities of living in an environment where it was almost a given that the bad guys would carry weapons. He asserted a final time, ‘You need a gun in your house,’ and as far as he was concerned, that was the end of the conversation.
At the time we were filming, over 280 million guns were in circulation across the States, which worked out as almost one for every American. Driving to the next location, I couldn’t help but express just how much the numbers scared me. Our American driver and sound guy had very different takes.
Our sound guy wasn’t an owner, but our crew driver had two shotguns. Sound guy Matt explained that, to Americans, guns were always presented as cool. Agreeing that philosophically they definitely weren’t, he saw guns presented in a cultural context in the same way a motorcycle would be. They were cool, powerful AND legal, so why not have one? Given that logic, I started to see just how polar opposite the American attitude was to my British one.
As far as I was concerned, to the average man in the UK guns weren’t real. They were plastic toys we’d run around with making ‘pee yaw’ noises. For most British kids, toy guns were cool to play with, but rarely would that cool sustain into adulthood.
Growing up I had toy guns in crazy colours made of cheap plastic. At no point did I ever think ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this was real?’ Talking to Matt, it became clear that, for many Yanks, guns had a level of cool no different to a motorbike or fast car.
In an effort to understand guns, I figured I should fire one. I met up with reserve cop Paul and was shown around his firing range and retail business, which carried over 400 guns in stock. His cheapest handgun came in around the $200 mark, which unbelievably was cheaper than the sneakers I had on.
I stood staring at a huge wall filled with handguns, Paul span me on the spot gesturing toward the ‘best bits’ behind glass. The bits he referred to were the bigger weapons for sale, some of which didn’t even look real. With extending this and snapping on that, most of the shotguns looked like props from Robocop.
One of his bestsellers was the .12 gauge shotgun, and Paul referred to it as a ‘home defence specialty’. The hunk of metal looked like it’d fallen from the pages of a Judge Dredd comic and the very grey, very white customer base filling his shop all looked very excitedly at the weapon.
Paul explained that, during the protests, all law enforcement was pulled into the busiest areas leaving huge chunks of residential roads un-policed. As a result, he saw a huge spike in gun purchases as people wanted to protect their homes, property and themselves. In the four months post-riots, gun sales in Paul’s shop were up 84 per cent compared to the previous year. According to Paul, four in five of his customers were white.
His white, middle-aged customers feared the rioting black faces they had seen on the news. The irony was that statistically, these African-Americans were far more likely to be killed by firearms carried by police or civilians.
As a reserve officer, Paul wanted me to understand the danger all officers were putting themselves in, but more importantly, how easy it would be to make a life-changing snap decision when under pressure and holding a weapon. His team created an artificial scenario and suddenly I found myself in the exact same position I’d seen the training rookie cops subjected to.
Paul attempted to make me feel just some of what he’d experience while on duty. He’d constantly find himself alone in testing situations knowing the nearest backup could be seven to ten minutes away. He handed me a blue replica gun that was the exact same size and weight as his on-duty weapon. I was armed with paint pellets and sent towards a doorway for a training exercise intended to test reaction to and management of a dangerous scenario. I wasn’t told what would meet me on the other side and the closer I got, the heavier the gun became.
The room was massive and two masked men argued loudly. Noticing me, they advanced as I pathetically attempted to take control. My meek voice was doing a shit job of sounding butch and then, as if from nowhere, one of the two men produced a knife and came right at me. I was literally back to the wall at this point and pulled my gun shooting a single paint pellet in his stomach.
I had to make a decision quickly and ended up making a bad one … But I wasn’t an officer and I hadn’t been trained. Getting it wrong as a civilian wasn’t in any way the same as doing so as an officer of the law. But what would it take to minimise police officers making life-ending bad decisions?
They changed the law; they made it better for everyone else
Only fifty years had passed since African-Americans marched for civil rights and equality. With modern times marred by mounting incidents of police brutality, a new generation has become politicised. Demanding a change in the police treatment and media portrayal, this younger, louder, internet savvy wave of voices forced the country to confront the uncomfortable truth that racism still runs deep in America.
Since Michael Brown lost his life, Ferguson has seen some positive changes. In 2014, three out of the six city councillors were now black, offering a perspective that reflected the majority of the constituency. There was a new police chief with a whole new attitude beginning his tenure making a call for help from the community. A new bill was passed capping the amount of revenue the city could collect from traffic violations. But Clifton felt there was still more to do.
It was his high-school graduation party and I’d been invited to join the barbecue. Graduating and becoming the pride of his family, Clifton was heading to Washington State University to read African-American and Political Studies. In search of a little more insight into who he was at home, I asked him if he’d show me his bedroom.
Full of the expected teenage mess but weighed down with trophies, Clifton talked me through his favourite sneakers, hats and books. Flicking through what most inspired him, Clifton pulled out a Martin Luther King quote. ‘Riots are the language of the unheard,’ he said with a smile; the relevance to all we’d discussed felt incredibly fitting.
Clifton felt his generation was being labelled as something it wasn’t, constantly dismissed en masse or stereotyped. Protesters were not the same as rioters and Black Lives Matter was certainly not the same thing as looters. Seeing his generation of activists as ‘continuing the work, but in a different way’, Clifton felt a part of something bigger than him.
Comparing the modern-day African-American struggle to the battles fought by the same people but in a different time, Clifton reminded me of the threats made to those who stood up to segregation. Judged and treated as criminals, the supposedly radical civil rights movement changed America for good. Clifton proudly proclaimed, ‘They changed the law, they made it better for everyone else.’
In his fatal contact with Michael Brown, officer Darren Wilson apparently didn’t break any law or protocol but what cannot be denied was the racist system crawling with corruption to which he belonged.
For the white minority in Ferguson, the police department represented safety and security. For the black majority living lives of constant harassment at the sharp end of institutional racism, their relationship with the law was riddled with resentment. The lack of understanding troubled me, as there wasn’t anything I’d seen that came close to some semblance of progress.
Agreeing to front a film about race in America meant I’d need to confront the reality that the flight home might not be one filled with optimism. Unfortunately, my instincts were right as the greater issue wasn’t individual acts of violence, but the system that allowed history to continually repeat itself.
Any hope I felt was placed not in some mi
raculous policy changes on every level, but in individuals like Clifton Kinnie, who had experienced the dark side of modern America. Historically, it had been the young idealists and dreamers like Clifton who had changed the country for the good. Maybe, just maybe, it could happen again.
CHAPTER 11
SOUTH SIDE
In 1996, aged thirteen, I had a special bond with the city of Chicago. I’d never been to the United States, let alone the Windy City, but from the comfort of my smelly teenage bedroom, I’d transport to Chicago weekly. Channel 4’s short-lived basketball show NBA Live fronted by Mark Webster and living legend Scoop Jackson afforded me a virtual courtside seat to witness arguably the greatest starting five of all time.
Longley, Pippen, Harper, Rodman and, of course, Michael Jordan were gods among men. I watched the legendary ’95/’96 season in awe, claiming ‘the Chi’ as if I’d been born and raised there. It was Jordan’s returning season after a year out playing Minor League baseball and every game was an event. He led the team to a record seventy wins and an NBA Championship all while wearing the now classic Jordan XI shoe.
I coveted those bloody sneakers but didn’t have the money or opportunity to buy myself a pair until a whole five years later. May God bless the year 2001 and the flawless reissued ‘Bred’ colourway that nearly brought me to tears the moment I held the box in my arms.
Just so you’re aware, I’m doing everything in my power not to have a massive rant about how sneaker culture has deteriorated into a money grab for the internet generation. My love for footwear stretches back to my childhood where I’d sit silently for hours drawing sneakers I’d seen in catalogues and magazines but couldn’t afford. To me, those shoes, that team, that season, that city – Chicago meant Jordan and an amazing moment in time.
