On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (11 page)

Let me ask you something, Alice. When you go up the F [local slang for the Curran-Fromhold
Correctional Facility (CFCF), the county jail], why do you see nothing but Black men
in jumpsuits sitting there in the visiting room? When you go to the halfway house,
why is it nothing but Black faces staring out the glass? They are taking our
children
, Alice. I am a law-abiding woman; my uncle was a cop. They can’t do that.

On seventy-one occasions between 2002 and 2010, I witnessed a woman discovering that
a partner or family member had become wanted by the police. Sometimes this notice
came in the form of a battering ram knocking her door in at three in the morning.
But oftentimes there was a gap between the identification of a man as wanted and the
police’s attempts to apprehend him. Before the authorities came knocking, a letter
would arrive from the courts explaining that a woman’s fiancé had either missed too
many payments on his court fees or failed to appear in court, and that a bench warrant
was out for his arrest. Or a woman would phone her son’s PO and learn that he did
indeed miss his piss test again, or failed to return to the halfway house in time
for curfew, and an arrest warrant would likely be issued, pending the judge’s decision.
At other times, women would find out that the man in their
lives was wanted because the police had tried and failed to apprehend him at another
location.

In fifty-eight of the seventy-one times I watched women receive this news, they reacted
with promises to shield their loved one from arrest. In local language, this is called
riding.

Broadly defined, to ride is to protect or avenge oneself or someone dear against assaults
to person or property. In this context, to ride means to shield a loved one from the
police, and to support him through his trial and confinement if one fails in the first
goal of keeping him free.
⁴

It may come as a surprise that the majority of women I met who learned that a spouse
or family member was wanted by the police initially expressed anger at the authorities,
not the man, and promised to support him and protect him while he was hunted. In part,
I think these women understood how easy it was to get a warrant when you are a Black
young man in neighborhoods like 6th Street; they understood that warrants are issued
not only for serious crimes but for technical violations of probation or parole, for
failure to pay steep court fines and fees, or for failure to appear for one of the
many court dates a man may have in a given month.
⁵
A second and related reason for women’s anger is that the police have lost considerable
legitimacy in the community: they are seen searching, questioning, beating, and rounding
up young men all over the neighborhood. As Miss Regina often put it, the police are
“an occupying force.” A third reason is more basic: no matter what a woman’s opinion
of the police or of the man’s actions, she loves him, and does not want to part with
him or see him subjected to what has been referred to as the pains of imprisonment.
⁶

Riding is easy to do in the abstract. If the authorities never come looking, a woman
can believe that she will hold up under police pressure and do her utmost to hide
the man and protect him. So long as the threats of police pressure and prison are
real but unrealized, a woman can believe in the most idealized version of herself.
The man, too, can believe in this ideal version of her and of their relationship.

A few days after Tommy received the notice from family court, he went to the police
station and turned himself in. The police never came to question Aisha. They did come
for Miss Regina’s son, Mike.

WHEN THE POLICE COME

I’d spent the night at Miss Regina’s house watching
Gangs of New York
with Mike and Chuck for maybe the hundredth time. I had fallen asleep on the living
room couch and so heard the banging in my dream, mixed in with the title page music,
which the DVD played over and over.

The door busting open brought me fully awake. I pushed myself into the couch to get
away from it, thinking it might hit me on the way down if it broke all the way off
its hinges. Two officers came through the door, both of them white, in SWAT gear,
with guns strapped to the sides of their legs. The first officer in pointed a gun
at me and asked who was in the house; he continued to point the gun toward me as he
went up the stairs. I wondered if Mike and Chuck were in the house somewhere, and
hoped they had gone.

The second officer in pulled me out of the cushions and, gripping my wrists, brought
me up off the couch and onto the floor, so that my shoulders and spine hit first and
my legs came down after. He quickly turned me over, and my face hit the floor. I couldn’t
brace myself, because he was still holding one of my wrists, now pinned behind me.
I wondered if he’d broken my nose or cheek. (Can you break a cheek?) His boot pressed
into my back, right at the spot where it had hit the floor, and I cried for him to
stop. He put my wrists in plastic cuffs behind my back; I knew this because metal
ones feel cold. My shoulder throbbed, and the handcuffs pinched. I tried to wriggle
my arms, and the cop moved his boot down to cover my hands, crushing my fingers together.
I yelled, but it came out quiet and raspy, like I had given up. My hipbones began
to ache—his weight was pushing them into the thin carpet.

A third cop, taller and skinnier, blond hair cut close to his head, entered the house
and walked into the kitchen. I could hear china breaking, and watched him pull the
fridge away from the wall. Then he came into the living room and pulled a small knife
from its sheath on his lower leg. He cut the fabric off the couch, revealing the foam
inside. Then he moved to the closet and pulled board games and photo albums and old
shoes out onto the floor. He climbed on top of the TV stand and pushed the squares
of the drop ceiling out, letting them hit the floor one on top of the other.

I could hear banging and clattering from upstairs, and then Miss Regina screaming
at the cop not to shoot her, pleading with him to let her get dressed. All the while,
the cop with his foot on me yelled for me to say where Mike was hiding. It would be
my fault when Miss Regina’s house got destroyed, he said. “And I can tell she takes
pride in her house.”

TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION

If the police decide to go after a man, chances are they will ask his relatives and
partner where he is. Because these intimates are immersed in the lives of their legally
precarious family members and partners, they tend to have considerable knowledge about
their activities and routines. They know where a young man shops and sleeps, where
he keeps his possessions, and with whom he is connected.

These days it isn’t difficult, expensive, or time consuming for the police to identify
family members who may have information about the whereabouts or incriminating activities
of a man they are after. Nor does it require direct knowledge of the neighborhood
or its inhabitants gained through close association. Rather, information about a man’s
relatives, children, partner, and relationship history can now be easily retrieved
with a few keystrokes.

When the police arrest and process a man, they ask him to provide a good deal of information
about his friends and relatives—where they live and where he lives, what names they
go by, how to reach them. The more information he provides, the lower his bail will
be, so he has a significant incentive to do this. By the time a man has been arrested
a number of times, the police have substantial information about where his girlfriend
works, where his mother lives, where his child goes to school.

Once a man has become wanted, the police visit his mother or girlfriend, and try to
persuade her to give him up. In the words of one former Warrant Unit officer, “We
might be able to track people with their cell phones or see every guy with a warrant
in the neighborhood up on the computer screen, but when it comes down to it, you always
go through the girlfriend, the grandmother, because she knows where he is, and she
knows what he’s done.”
⁷

After the police locate a family member or partner, they employ a series of techniques
to gain the woman’s cooperation. These begin when the police are searching for a man
or arresting him, but may continue through his trial and sentencing as they attempt
to gather information that will facilitate a conviction.
⁸

The most direct pressure the police apply to women to get them to talk is physical
force: the destruction of their property and, in some cases, bodily injury. From what
I have seen around 6th Street and nearby neighborhoods, police violence toward women
occurs most frequently during raids. During these raids and also during interrogations,
they deploy a number of less physical tactics to get uncooperative women to talk.
The major three are threats of arrest, eviction, and loss of child custody.

Threats of Arrest

During raids and interrogations, the police threaten to arrest women for an array
of crimes. First, they explain to a woman that her efforts to protect the man in her
life constitute crimes in their own right. When Chuck’s mother, Miss Linda, blocked
the police’s entrance to her home and waved an officer away as he pulled up her carpet
and opened up her ceiling, the officers explained that they could charge her with
assault on an officer, aiding and abetting a fugitive, and interfering with an arrest.
They also told her that she would face charges for the gun they found in her house,
since she didn’t have a permit for it. (In fact, in Philadelphia a permit is required
only for carrying.) When Aisha’s neighbor said she would refuse to testify against
her son, officers told her that she would go to jail for contempt. Once she agreed
to cooperate, they informed her that if she changed her statement she would be jailed
for lying under oath.

Beyond her efforts to protect the man in question, the police make it clear to a woman
that many of her routine practices and everyday behaviors are grounds for arrest.
Over the course of raids and interrogations, the officers make women realize that
their daily lives are full of crimes, crimes the police are well aware of, and crimes
that carry
high punishments, should the authorities feel inclined to pursue them. When the police
came for Mike’s cousin, they told his aunt that the property taxes she hadn’t paid
and some long-overdue traffic fines constituted tax evasion and contempt of court.
The electricity that she was getting from her neighbor two doors down, via three joined
extension cords trailed through the back alley (because her own electricity had long
been cut off, and for the use of which she was babysitting her neighbor’s two children
three times a week), constituted theft, a public hazard, and a violation of city code.

The police also explain to a woman that she can be charged for the man’s crimes. Mike’s
girlfriend told me she was sure she would be charged for possessing the gun or the
drugs if she didn’t give Mike up, since the police found them in her house and car.
The police also threatened to bring her up on conspiracy charges, claiming that they
had placed a tap on her cell phone and so had proof that she was aware of Mike’s activities.

Police raids also place a woman’s other male relatives in jeopardy. When Mike had
a warrant out for his arrest and the police were showing up at his mother’s house,
she became very worried that her fiancé, who was driving without a license and who
was also selling small quantities of marijuana as a supplement to his job at the hospital,
would come under scrutiny. Because it is very likely that the other men in a woman’s
life are also facing some violation or pending legal action (or engaged in the drug
trade or other illegal work), the police’s pursuit of one man represents a fairly
direct threat to the other men a woman holds dear.

Finally, the police tell a woman that if her present and past behavior is insufficient
grounds for arrest, they will use every technology at their disposal to monitor her
future activities. Any new crimes she commits will be quickly identified and prosecuted,
along with any future crimes committed by her nearest and dearest. If she drives after
she has been drinking, if she smokes marijuana, if her son steals candy from the store—they
will know, and she or he will go to jail.

The threat of arrest and imprisonment is a powerful technique of persuasion, and perhaps
more so when deployed on women. Fewer women than men go to prison or jail, making
it a scarier prospect. Women don’t receive the same degree of familial support available
to
men, as visiting people in prison is considered women’s work, done for men by their
female partners and kin, and men are less able to visit.
⁹
In the 6th Street neighborhood, people tend to regard imprisonment as more of an
indictment of a woman’s character and lifestyle than a man’s, partly on the grounds
that police routinely stop and search men, while women must do something more extreme
to get the police’s attention.

Threats of Eviction

In addition to threats of arrest and imprisonment, the police threaten to evict women
who do not cooperate.
¹⁰
They told my next-door neighbor that if she didn’t give up her nephew, they would
call Licensing and Inspection and get her dilapidated house condemned. And when the
police came to Steve’s grandmother’s house looking for him, they noted that the electricity
and gas weren’t on, the water wasn’t running, and the bathtub was being used as an
outhouse. These violations of the municipal health and building codes would easily
constitute grounds for the city to repossess her property. The officers also informed
her that the infestation of roaches, mice, and fleas in the house were sufficient
grounds for the landlord to revoke her lease. Further, since she had placed the bail
for Steve in her name, his running meant that the city could go after her for the
entire bail amount—not just the 10 percent she put up, which meant the city could
also take her car and her future earnings. When the police came to Aisha’s neighbor’s
house looking for the neighbor’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, they informed her
that if she didn’t give him up, they would come back late at night in a full raid.
Since her apartment was subsidized, she could be immediately evicted for harboring
a fugitive and putting her neighbors at risk. She would lose her present accommodations
and all rights to obtain subsidized housing in the future.