Profiling Cops

This long essay about conflicts with the pigs has sat on my personal Earthlink Webpage since 2004, but they quit supporting it in 2012 and when I dropped Earthlink this year it disappeared completely. Altho it was written in 1999, I occasionally linked to it when commenting on current police killings such as the black man shot for no reason two days ago in Baton Rouge LA and just yesterday in routine traffic stop in Minnesota. WHEN WILL IT END?

Profiling Cops
(original title: I don't like pigs!)
by Shale
June 1999

Why would I be more likely to believe the word of a perp over that of the arresting officer? Why would an apparently law abiding, upstanding citizen have his heart rate increase at the sight of those who are supposedly here to "protect and to serve?" Paranoia or conditioned reflex?

It seems the news is filled with stories of police officers out of control, stealing, dealing drugs, violating citizens' civil rights, beating or shooting them, often killing them in rage or with premeditation. It has always been this way, but in the past decade it seems to be more blatant and vicious. Or, in the age of ubiquitous surveillance video cameras, has it just become more easily documented.

The police would have us believe that it is coincidence that so many black men are beaten and killed by officers, and they deny that racism is a part of their "profiling" when blacks are stopped and searched for no other apparent reason. This is a focus of much protest right now, and much is being said about it while politicians do damage control to prevent a public uprising against the police.

Black rapper Ice-T got criticized in 1993 for his song "Cop Killer," but he quite unapologetically said he didn't think it was controversial because he thought everyone hated the police. "Everybody I know hates the police," he said. That would probably be the consensus in the black community, but I'm a white, middle class, man who also does not like the police. This dislike has come from years of bad experiences with police officers.

Some people are surprised to find out that I was once a cop. It seemed the natural way to go since I was a young man out of the military, and was already used to the regimentation. I was working as a security guard, so why not become a real cop?



I applied at the New Orleans Police Department in 1968, passed all the tests, and was filling out my last paperwork at the police academy when the form asked for my religion. Agnostic at the time, I put "none." That got me a personal interview with a Major Terrebone, who couldn't understand how I would make the right moral decisions without the fear of god. For that reason I did not get on the NOPD.

I was accepted by the Harbor Police Dept. a state agency with jurisdiction over the properties of the Port of New Orleans. Not as prestigious as the city police, but a real police force nonetheless.



During this time, between Nov. '68 and Jan '70, those god-fearing officers of the first district of the NOPD, were busted for operating a large burglary ring. Since that time it has gotten worse, with New Orleans' "finest" being caught not only in theft, but intimidation and murder. This was about the time that Officer Serpico was battling the corruption on the New York Police Dept. and nearly got killed for it. It finally came out that the NOPD is one of the most corrupt departments in the country, so I suppose Maj. Terrebone actually did me a favor by keeping me from joining. I may have been faced with the ethical dilemma of turning in a corrupt brother officer and breaking the code of silence that is the backbone of organized crime and police departments.

I was a good cop. Which is why I only lasted about a year. How do you stay decent when surrounded by those who feel they are above the law. And, because of everyone covering everybody's ass, they are above the law!

In 1969, I saw selective law enforcement firsthand. I heard a cop bragging about busting two men engaged in sex in a car on a deserted road. It was a Catholic priest who solicited the sex. Sergeant Joe (Italiano), a faithful Catholic, chased the priest off with a warning and arrested the other guy.

This same Sgt. Joe, from a large family of police officers, once put me on the spot for not letting him in the back seat of my patrol car to beat up a suspect that I had arrested. It was a black man who pushed down a white woman at the ferry landing and took her purse. I ran him down and made the collar, but Joe was furious and wanted to get in some punches before we booked him downtown. I wouldn't let him in the car, although I'm sure god would have approved.

As Joe Cocker would say, I quit the police department, got myself a steady job. Actually, I dropped out, let my hair and beard grow and went into a number of gigs for a few years. This dropping out started while I was still on the department, and one night, while hanging out off duty at the Seven Seas bar on St. Phillip St. some city cops came in to harass the unsavory patrons there. It was with much delight, when they asked for ID, that I pulled out my cop badge and asked them why they were shaking down my friends. I let them think they blew my cover, although I had already identified myself as a cop to the bartender and several of the heads that I befriended.

When I was a cop in New Orleans in 1969, I didn't relate to many of my fellow officers. I did have one friend, an ex-serviceman, a Vietnam vet named Charles. He was the first black person that I developed a friendship with. In New Orleans, with its Creole mixture, I didn't think it was such a big deal for a white man and a black man to be friends, but a lieutenant once took me aside and told me it was bad enough we have to work with "them" but we shouldn't be seeing them on our own time. One racist pig on a police department? Things were different in 1969? Those were just the priors - check the current rap sheet.



But, back to why I really don't like pigs. (No offense to our Suidaeceous critters) It seems that every encounter I've ever had with police has been an unpleasant one.

In 1970 I went to San Francisco with a couple of friends to catch the last of the hippie happening. My friend was going to sell her camera, and another guy and I accompanied her to the pawnshop district. We made the sale and were immediately approached by undercover cops who handcuffed us and took us to be booked on "suspicion of selling stolen goods." We were suspicious because we had beards and long hair, wore too much jewelry and beads, sandals and bell-bottom Levi's.

I got booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and insulted by a cop doing my strip search who told me to take a bath. I was quite clean except for my feet, that were covered in city grime from wearing sandals. I was given a blanket and put in a cell. SLAM! A couple of hours later they came and let us out, since we were not selling stolen goods. No apology, no acknowledgment that they were wrong, no ride back to the part of town where they removed us. Luckily, the traffic cops were also unproductive that day because the VW was still parked where we left it.

That was my bad experience with San Francisco pigs. A couple of us wanted to explore California, so we drove the bug down the Pacific Coast Hiway to look up a friend in San Diego. It was late night somewhere around Santa Barbara and I was dangerously tired. We pulled over and slept on a deserted, quiet part of the road. Rudely awakened by some cops pounding on the window, they told us that it was a dangerous area to be sleeping in. They noticed the nice mahogany night stick that I had next to my seat, a remnant of my days as a cop that I still kept in the car (you know, in case you find yourself in a dangerous area). They "confiscated" it. We weren't arrested, just told to take off, while they stole my property. (OK, there was a dirty hash pipe in the glove box, so we didn't protest). I was sent, sleep deprived and dangerous, down the road with the new knowledge that pigs were just another rip-off gang to watch out for.

Back in New Orleans about 1971, I was living in a cheap communal apartment and had a part time job pumping gas just outside the Treme neighborhood. My hair was shoulder length by now. I was the official image of a hippie, but was gainfully employed, and had just gotten off work one morning and was walking down the street, shirt in hand, when a cop car pulled up and I was stopped. They told me to empty my pockets on the patrol car hood, I asked why they stopped me.

I knew why I was stopped, that suspicion thing again. There was a rock concert near New Orleans and a lot of out-of-town heads had come to the city. Did they think I'd be stupid enough to be holding? One cop told me to put my shirt on, and I asked why. He wasn't prepared to be challenged and started to get nasty when I quoted him the law that did not require men to wear shirts on a public street. I just turned around and put my hands behind my back waiting for the cuffs. The other cop, luckily in control, asked if I wanted to be arrested. I said no, but I wasn't going to put my shirt on. They must have figured that this could be one of those pesky new civil rights issues and let me go. Now that I look back on the ease with which people get murdered by the NOPD, I was probably very lucky to escape unharmed with my defiance.



So, now I learned that pigs steal from you and harass you for no other reason than your appearance. Nothing new to black people of course. I'm sure I scared my black coworker and roommate, Eli, when we were stopped by some cops one night in '72 while walking together outside the Quarter. I challenged the cop as to why we were being stopped. He said there was a robbery in the area and he was checking for suspects. I asked if the suspects were a white guy and a black guy fitting our description. Eli just stood there quietly. Being a lifelong resident of New Orleans he knew the submissive posture required of black men to survive in a police state. Again, this challenge to the cop went without incident, but by being a white male with long hair and beard, I was getting a glimpse of what it was like being targeted just for your appearance.

This harassment by the pigs continued into 1973 when I was living in the Faubourg Marigny, and would often walk home at night by Washington Square. At least three different times I would be stopped and told to empty my pockets by the neighborhood cops. They knew I was a local resident, but with the long hair, they were hoping to catch me holding drugs. At the time I was employed by the New Orleans Museum of Art and seldom did drugs anymore, and definitely wouldn't be foolish enough to carry them around on foot in a police state.

After the third harassment, I complained to the police department. They sent an officer to my home while I was at work, but my partner Jim called me and put the cop on the phone. Of course he was explaining why it was necessary for the cops to detain me on suspicion and search my pockets without a warrant, and I was arguing with him about it. Jim later got on me because I was making the cop so red-in-the-face angry while he was there with him in the apartment. I was learning that pigs don't like to be challenged by the citizenry.

But, it wasn't just the hard city cops who liked to target long-haired freeks. My father was moving to Mississippi at this time, and I was driving my stepmother and infant half-brother across the state to their farm. I knew the speed trap towns along Hwy 84 and was careful not to do anything wrong, but that long hair had to get a closer look, as well as the Illinois plate. The patrol car stopped us, and the cop was almost going to make us unload the entire back seat and trunk of that 59 Chrysler, on "suspicion." Luckily, after he saw us up close he realized we were just a redneck family, not the Manson gang. He did badger me into admitting that I had a six-pack of beer in the trunk (dry county) but to his credit, let us go without stealing it. Maybe it being Sunday helped a little.

That was my youth, a wild radical looking young man with long hair could expect to be "profiled" as a ne'er-do-well troublemaker. So, I put on some years, thinned out my now short hair, and turned my beard grey. In March '95 as a respectable looking member of the community in Gainesville, I was bicycling home from my job at Shands Hospital about 11:40 pm through the University of Florida campus. It was cold and I was bundled up, so my usual work scrubs didn't show. The Campus Cops were driving toward me and shined their spotlight on me. I kept going and they turned around, drove back and cut me off.

They gave me a brief interrogation - what was I doing out on my bike so late at night, especially such a cold night. But they wouldn't give me any information as to why they stopped me. They told me that the rear red light wasn't working on my bike, so I was real polite to avoid a $30 ticket. Of course that was an excuse, because they couldn't see my burned out light when they first approached me with the spotlight. That later irritated me no end, to have to be apologetic to two pigs who were harassing me for "suspicion."

I learned that even a middle aged, white, working stiff, is still subject to harassment by the pigs. Imagine had I been younger, or darker. The stops would be more frequent, the treatment perhaps less civil, although being detained against your will for "suspicion" is always uncivil. I always resent it, and I'm sure the resentment is much greater with black men, the hatred more seething.

I'm sure there are good, honest, polite, conscientious cops out there. I was one for a while. I really was there to serve the public - so was Charles. But we both finally realized that we were misfits in the occupation and left.

Since that initial realization, and close experience with cop culture, my encounters with pigs have been mostly adversarial. I'm sure there are good cops that I never see, because they aren't out harassing the populace. But the nature of "profiling" is prejudicial, and when I see the guy with the gun and stick and authority to harm me, it scares me, because that is what I've been taught.

 

WHEN THE FUCK IS THIS MURDER BY PIGS GOING TO STOP?

This is a disturbing video showing what can happen to any BLACK person for no reason except for the fear, cowardice and bigotry of fucking white PIGS.

This video showed the anguish of the girlfriend as she went thru the ordeal of being threatened by the pigs who had just shot her BLACK boyfriend multiple times. It is heartbreaking.

And, don't you ignorant asswipes tell me "all lives matter" or "white lives matter" because these almost daily murders are only on black ppl. Until we see white ppl senselessly shot by the pigs, STFU!

BLACK LIVES MATTER, MOTHERFUCKERS!

https://www.************/100007611243538/videos/vb.100007611243538/1690073837922975/?type=2&theater

Luckily, the cell fone video was livestreamed to facebook because pigs have been known to confiscate fones & cams to destroy evidence.

BTW, the man died. This just 2 days after the Baton Rouge citizen video of a BLACK man being killed by white pigs. WHEN IS IT GOING TO STOP! BLACK LIVES MATTER.

http://www.startribune.com/aftermath-of.../385789251/


For those who did not play the video and feel the gut wrenching & heartbreaking impact of this man & woman's ordeal on what should have been just a routine day of driving their car, I did a screen cap and transcribed her dialogue as she was still being held at gunpoint by the PIG


(BTW, I have been admonished for using the old '60s term PIG for police officers. Sorry, I am from the Tell-It-Like-It-Is era)

 

Interesting read, Shale. I too worked as a security official for over a year. I had no desire to continue into becoming a police officer like the rest of my coworkers though. It was a neat experience as well as a time wasting one. I got to work behind the scenes of a few movies and a TV show that was being filmed in my city, since I provided security for them. The cool part was that I got to see how movies were made and some of the behind the scene workers, actors, and set designers do their work. I got to work with the public in a few areas too. But one thing I learned while guarding a bookstore and a community college campus was not to judge and profile every character based on their appearance. Because while the young male punk with the skateboard and the baggy pants might look like a stereotypical trouble maker, it isn't always the case. Sometimes the most innocent looking people are the deviant sneaky ones. In fact my coworker and I caught a sweet old granny trying to steal some items at the bookstore; she looked like the last person you'd expect to fit the profile of a kleptomaniac. When I started the job, I took a vow to myself not to profile people only skin deep.

 

I am often at a loss as to which place to put some of my writings so I just opted for this. What would be a better place?