2.0
June 10, 2015

Bike Riding in the Land of the Free.

lost-bike-girl-02-web-1024x682

Read the first part of this story, here!

His face says he isn’t in a mood to chat.

“Can I see your ID?”

I say, “Officer, I am so sorry, I am headed straight home, I didn’t bring my wallet. I just ate a big dinner and wanted to head out for a quick spin before bed. We don’t need to do this. I get it.”

“You don’t have your ID?”

“No, I am just five minutes from my house, really.”

He pulls out a notepad and asks me for my name. I am stunned. Didn’t we skip a part?

“Wait! No! No! No! We don’t have to…”

I am shocked. I can’t handle another ticket. He is not really giving me a ticket for this?! I can’t afford another ticket.

He repeats himself.

“Name!?”

“Sarah.” I spell it out. “S-a-r-a-h.”

I am used to spelling out my name since no-one can spell Spieth right, but I am hoping Jordan Spieth, the up-and coming golfer who recently glossed the cover of a Sports Illustrated, will change that.

“Last name?”

I freeze. I have never been in this situation. I have nothing on me verifying my ID. Do I have to give him my real name?

He lifts the mic on his left breast pocket to his mouth.

“Single, white female on a bicycle. Yes.”

“Last name!” he shouts at me.

“Smith!” I blurt out. Then I spell it “S-m-i-t-h.”

“Date of birth?”

My voice is shaky.

“10/08/82.”

Back into his radio: “Yes. E Speedway.”

“Last four digits of your social?”

“What?! I don’t have to give you that! This is ridiculous! Come on. Let me go home! Let me just go home!”

He skips onto the next question.

“Address?”

I take a big inhale and push out the first number of the permanent address associated with my driver’s license.

“5,” then the next “6…2.”

Then I freeze. I can’t get another word out.

My mind goes to my lover. His apartment is so close that I can almost see it. But the safety that I feel when my head rests on his chest is a million miles away. I can barely breathe as my eyes well up.

He looks up from his notepad: “Now, I am going to warn you…”

“Oh god!? Oh God! Really!? Thank you!”

My chest opens up.

“No! No, I am warning you that if I go to my car and call this in and find that you have been giving me fake information, I am taking you to jail.”

My throat closes more tightly than before, my wide eyes watch as two more squad cars show up. I am petrified.

I don’t see the other two officers get out of their cars and walk over. I only notice them once they are already standing in formation around me. I am encircled by three grown men, their three squad cars, and all their lights that are turning my night into day.

My insides are trembling. My body is getting so hot under my hoodie and my eyes start pouring out tears. I would have never expected myself to require that much man power.

He sneers at me: “Now do you want to start over?”

“Yes,” I push out.

We start over.

“First name?”

“Sarah. S-a-r-a-h.”

“Then why did you lie about your last name? If you have nothing to hide?”

“Because I am scared! Because you scare me! Because I am not exactly in this situation every day, you know!”

“Well that was stupid.”

Seriously? Stupid? Right now I want to tell him how small he is. Right now I want to tell him that I watched the Wall fall, that I speak four languages, that I remember Desert Storm, and that I have sat in a bomb bunker waiting for the sirens to stop.

Why am I continuously given the idea that because I don’t have a warrant out for my arrest, I ought to be just fine with the events of my current situation? Armed and around me in formation, shining their bright lights on me and making efforts to intimidate me, the three grown men just can’t figure out what’s got the girl so scared! Maybe if I take my sweater off and try to look hot.

The third officer, standing farthest away from me is young and handsome and seems to have a pained expression on his face in what almost looks like empathy for how I am unraveling. But I realize there is a chain of command at work here and I know better than to put my hope in it.

The first officer’s head pokes out from behind his squad car and tells the other two they can leave and tells me to “hang out for a minute”. At this point I know I am not “hanging out” to await my gentle warning and my heartfelt wishes for a safe evening. I am hanging out while he takes down everything that I said that he liked in detail in case I decide to fight the stupid ticket he is currently printing for me in court. I am a f*cking veteran at this by now!

“Sarah, I am citing you for running a red light,” as he hands me my ticket.

$350.

The law treats a bike like a car.

I rip the ticket out of his hand and shout at him: “You are a detestable person! How on Earth am I supposed to absorb another ticket?!”

I can tell he doesn’t give a sh*t about what I think of him as he makes his way back around his car. As I turn to pick up my bike a tear rolls off my cheek and hits the ground. I shout into the night air: “You are a fucking prick!”

The single syllable has barely left my lips before remorse sets in. F*ck! These things are only over as long as the officer says they’re over. A cold shiver runs down my back. I stand frozen staring straight ahead into the night and bracing myself to hear his car door slam and see him stomp back around his car to teach me a lesson about insulting an officer.

He doesn’t. He drives off.

I am still trembling as I turn my bike around and push it back to my lover’s house. My tears slow and then stop. My mouth is dry. My mind is blank. I walk through the dodgy neighborhood, shaken and insecure. My throat and my gut are clenched as tightly as the crumpled ticket in my hand. I cannot figure out what exactly was made safer in all this. It surely wasn’t me.

When I arrive at his house, I drop my bike in front of his door, walk in and unhinge myself onto his bed where he is lying. I wrap his arms around me and curl myself into a ball.

“Hey!? Hey!? Hey…What’s going on, Baby? Hey.”

Seeing that something has definitely happened to me, he says sweetly: “Heeey You. Wanna talk to me? Hmmm.?”

I couldn’t get a word out for one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three…and then I busted open. I just busted open. In no time, I drenched his shirt with hot tears and struggled to squeeze words past the shame of my stupidity and having been hit with yet another ticket. Every time I get a little breathing room, I f*ck everything up again.

He was still trying to keep himself calm. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to leave him guessing. He has seen too much. He has seen too much of the very, very worst of what happens to people. And he has met the people who do the very, very worst to people. Twelve years in the joint. He has shared only some of the dark stories because he knows how sensitive I am, but what I do know is enough to know that he had reason to imagine a kind of worst case scenario that is far, far beyond what most of us have been confronted with.

As I started squeezing out the words of what had happened, he got angry. He got angry at himself for letting me go and he got angry at me for being so damn naïve.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know until he explained to me, that those women out there are hookin’ and that this is a drug neighborhood, that the cops have lost a couple of their own around here and are real uptight. That I would have been more likely on a drug run than on a bike ride because I had a big dinner.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know that who I was and what I was doing made next to no sense for the neighborhood. I didn’t know that the officers had little precedent on a master’s degree’d, yoga therapist just going for a spin. My lover struggled to empathize with my collapsed state. He didn’t want to coddle me. He wanted me to grow up, be smart.

I felt really alone. I begged him to hear me, but he couldn’t. Not then. Not till the next day when the horrors that were thrashing around in his mind of what could have happened to me finally stilled.

I can’t figure out if I am naïve or European. I had gotten half way through my teens before I left Germany and I still come from a time where the police were like us. They helped me get home safely and even cheered champagne with us on the streets on New Years’ Eve. I don’t remember ever being afraid of the police. I rightfully understood myself as part of the peaceful majority. None of my friends in Germany are afraid of the police.

But then this is crazy socialist Germany, where you can climb a tree without getting arrested, tactfully alleviate your bladder without being slapped with a lifelong label as a sex offender. Where you may be belligerently drunk in public as long as you are not hurting anyone or yourself. Where children aren’t hit with arrest records that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, and where prison is, believe it or not, rehabilitative.

There is a notion at work in this country that I may “expect” to get in trouble with the police if certain conditions are present. Am I supposed to expect harsh treatment because of what I am doing and how I look? And if that is the case, then is this justice of ours really all that blind? And what if I don’t look like I look? What if I look brown?

Over the last months, I have often thought of the famous Ted Talk where brain research expert Jill Bolte Taylor recounts the events of her very own stroke. Much like that, I have been able to apply my master’s level expertise in Peace and Conflict Studies to the bubble of my very own life. I have had to render the privilege of considering only intellectually the profound injustices in our system and had a chance to feel a few of them on my own skin. I am better for it.

Recently, as I have been driving past scenes of six or eight officers standing around a single homeless-looking person, I wonder why we act surprised that we have a bullying problem in our children.

This is us. And we are looking at two very frightening and interrelated facts: 1) an overstaffed, over-equipped, over-eager and over-funded police force and 2) a system of private prisons that are entering contracts with state and local governments that guarantee a minimum occupancy rate of 90 to 100 percent.

What I am telling you, even If you don’t believe it yet, is that it will be you. It will be you and you and me. It will be us. Injustice and structural violence are a dish no longer just served to the poor.

Forget that the federal prison population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010. Forget that more people are being funneled into the prison system even if actual crime rates are falling. Forget that we are looking at what is called a positive feedback loop with our own societal disease. People are profiting from a malfunctioning system. People thus have a vested interest in maintaining a malfunctioning system. This, by definition, will grow the malfunctioning of the system. Forget all that.

What is much, much worse, is that currently there is a board room somewhere, where people are analyzing recent reading levels of second graders and deciding how many prisons to build.

It is time.

It is time.

As for me, I am headed back to court on June 10. I have no illusions about getting out of this ticket. But I am going to stand in my dignity. I am going to take back my power. And I may even decide to draw a few diagrams of my own.

~

Relephant:

The Real Motives Behind Police Militarization in the U.S.

~

Author: Sarah Spieth

Editor: Travis May

Photo: bicyclefimfestival.com

Read 3 Comments and Reply
X

Read 3 comments and reply

Top Contributors Latest

Sarah Spieth