From the Vault: 'My Earliest Memory of the Police'

An Unpublished Piece

Back in 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, I often sat at my mom’s back porch at night, overlooking the remnants of the west side, a sea of empty lots dating back to the fiery protests following Martin Luther King Jr’s death. I did so much personal writing that I never published. Mostly because it was close to my heart, or I couldn’t work out the kinks.

Here is one of those pieces, which has remained in my Google Drive drafts for over two years. It concerns my earliest memory of seeing the police, and the permanent fear the sight instilled in me. Here is the raw form.

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I’ve thought about whether I should tell this story since this all began, but I need to talk about a gnawing memory. For a stretch, while I was growing up, I was homeless. Initially, I grew up in the auto-parts store my father owned on the west side of Chicago. The store was seriously struggling, even after my dad invested everything he had, to the point that we lost our apartment and our car. With nowhere to sleep, we slept on the floor of this shop, surrounded by shelves stocked with motor oil. This remained our living situation from the time I was five and lasted until I turned eleven. Everyday felt like the tallest mountain; sometimes we didn’t have heat, and we never had central air. Still, my parents worked everyday in that sweaty dingy place, and they did everything they could to stay afloat. We barely turned on the television because we needed to keep the electric costs low, so I rarely watched movies.   

By my eleventh birthday, the store was near-closure. My dad knew the deal. And it was a solid run, honestly. But with the strain of a failing business, and a young family, he suffered a massive heart attack. Nearly ending his life. The doctors basically told him to retire or die. So the store had to close. Unfortunately, we still had stuff there along with stock, and owed money to our landlord. 

With my dad still recuperating from his heart attack, my mom tried to sell off the stock, while moving our stuff, and avoiding the landlord until we could find another place to stay. How did we avoid him? We slept in a disused church van during the day. We did that for a couple of weeks and nearly got away with it. But on the last day, the landlord called the police. The police showed up: saw the blankets and pillows, saw us (my mom, myself, my twelve year old brother, and my five year-old sister) and us in the back of the squad car.

On the way to the police station, the cops circled the neighborhood. If they saw a sex worker they’d pull over and call her a slut or a whore. They’d stop drug dealers and insult them, too. They also paused to talk to other cops. All while these kids were in the back of their car experiencing the worst moment of their lives, scared beyond belief, and hearing every word and insult they threw at other Black people: the sex workers, drug dealers, and random passersby who looked “suspicious.”

And logically, I understood why they took us in. They saw a family situation that looked precarious at best, which needed some type of social services. But they showed zero empathy nor awareness of the trauma they were inflicting on these three Black kids in the process. 

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017)

After making those rounds, we finally arrived at the police station. The officers handed us over and put us in an interrogation room. It felt like a movie, the room shone blindingly white, with a deafening echo inhabiting the space. They made us wait in that space as thoughts of being taken away from my mom invaded all of our heads. I remember seeing my brother and sister cry, then I began sobbing. That’s when the police came in and basically interrogated our mom with us present. Once again, no sense of regard for the three little Black kids clutching to their mother and clearly sobbing. I’ve rarely seen any film depict that terror accurately (Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is one of the rare exceptions).

After some debate (mostly discovering my mother didn’t have a record) they sent us to a homeless shelter. We rode in their squad car to there, too. Their parting words to us—mother and children—when we arrived amounted to a warning: They’d break up our family if we were caught again. What did they mean by “caught”? That question and fear remained unanswered in my head until my high school years. We stayed at that shelter for a few days; among the awful rumble of melancholy hidden behind everyone’s smiles which later dissolved into tears: children, mothers, fathers, and single one-nighters, during the night.

Eventually my aunt took us in and we were united with my dad, who recovered from his heart attack weeks later. And things improved significantly from there. But every time I see a cop, I see the callousness of those officers. I hear the cries of my siblings and of those in the shelter, and the fear of sitting in the back of that car, and the feeling of clutching my mom. So yeah, cops are routinely terrible. I know that not just from this incident, but from the the numerous other times I’ve been profiled and followed. And none of what’s happening right now has surprised me, at all.