On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (13 page)

“He must have had a gun or drugs on him,” Aisha’s aunt says.

“I didn’t see nothing,” a neighbor replies.

When the police cars begin to pull off, a neighbor says that she saw one cop punch
the man in the face after he was already cuffed.

Aisha’s cousin, a stout young man of nineteen, gets up off the steps.

“Yo, I’m out, Aisha. It’s too hot on your block.”

“Okay,” she laughs. “Tell your mom I said hi.”

An elderly woman comes out after a few minutes with a bucket of bleach and water and
pours it over the sidewalk, to clean the blood. Aisha and I go back to talking about
her boyfriend, who has just received a sentence of fifteen years in federal prison.
As the day goes on, I notice that Aisha and her family make no mention of what we
have seen. Perhaps because they don’t know the man personally, this event is not important
enough to recount to those not present when it occurred.

That summer was punctuated by more severe police action. On a hot afternoon in July,
Aisha and I stood on a crowded corner of a major commercial street and watched four
officers chase down her older sister’s boyfriend and strangle him. He was unarmed
and did not fight back. The newspapers reported his death as heart failure. In August,
we visited an old boyfriend of Aisha’s shortly after he got to county jail. Deep lacerations
covered his cheeks, and his eyes had swollen to tiny slits. The beating he took while
being arrested, and the subsequent infection left untreated while he sat in quarantine,
took most of the vision from his right eye.

In interviews, Warrant Unit officers explained to me that this violence represents
official (if unpublicized) policy, rather than a few cops taking things too far. The
Philadelphia police I interviewed have a liberal understanding of what constitutes
reasonable force, and a number of officers told me that they have orders from their
captains that any person who so much as touches a cop “better be going to the hospital.”

In sum, the police apply a certain amount of violence to women to get them to talk,
but substantially more to men as they chase them down and arrest them. The violence
that women witness and hear about fixes what the police are capable of doing firmly
in their minds. This knowledge likely spurs their cooperation, should the police desire
it.

BECOMING A SNITCH OR AN ABANDONER

As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, as they raid a woman’s house
and pull her in for questioning, the woman’s public reckoning begins. Relatives, neighbors,
and friends watch to see how she will hold up as the police threaten to arrest her,
to evict her, or to take her children away.

When the raids and interrogations begin, many women find that they cannot live up
to the hopes they and others had for their conduct. Rather than be the man’s “ride-or-die
chick,” they implore him to turn himself in. Rather than hide him and help him survive,
they kick him out of the house and cut off all contact, perhaps leaving him without
food or shelter. Rather than remain silent in the face of police questioning, they
give up all the information they can.

Shortly after Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, had given birth to their second child, the police
came to his mother’s house looking for him on a gun charge. When Marie heard this
news, she called me on the phone to discuss it and, in between her screams and cries,
explained her concerns for him:

You remember last time? He stopped eating! And then they put him in the hole [solitary
confinement] for no reason. Remember how he was in the hole? I can’t take those calls
no more. He was really losing it. No sunlight. Nobody to talk to. Plus, he could get
stabbed up, or get AIDS. How I’m supposed to take care of the baby? They don’t care
he got a bullet in his hip. Won’t none of them guards pay attention to that, and I
can tell it’s getting ready to come out [push through the skin].

Firm in her conviction that Mike would suffer in jail, and determined to keep her
growing family together, Marie promised to do whatever she could to protect him from
the authorities.

Then the police paid a visit to Marie’s house. They came early in the morning, waking
up the baby. They didn’t search the house, but sat and talked with her about the necessity
of turning Mike in.

I came over that afternoon. Visibly shaken, Marie seemed to have adopted quite a different
view of things:

MARIE: He needs to get away from these nut-ass niggas out here, Alice. It’s not safe
for him on the streets; he could get killed out here. He needs to go in there, get
his mind right, and come out here—

MARIE’S MOTHER:—and act like a man.

MARIE: Yes. Because the drama has to stop, Alice. He has too much stuff [legal entanglements].
He needs to go in and get all that taken care of. How he supposed to get a job when
he got two warrants on him? He needs a fresh start. He ain’t going to like it, but
he going. Soon as I see him [I’m calling the number on the card the police gave me].

In fact, Marie did not call the police on Mike right away; she tried to persuade him
to turn himself in. Mike refused, and Marie continued to try to “talk some sense into
him” over the next few days. She called the number on the card on the fifth day, after
a second visit from the police. As they drove him off in handcuffs, we sat on the
stoop and talked.

MARIE: I know he not going to take my visits right away but I don’t care, like, it
had to be done. It’s too much drama, Alice. He can call me a snitch, I don’t care.
I know in my heart—

MARIE’S MOTHER:—that was the right thing to do.

After Marie got Mike taken away, he castigated her daily from jail and spread the
word that she had snitched. This, she said, was nothing compared to the internal anguish
she felt over betraying the father of her two children, and her most trusted friend.
The pains of his confinement, she explained, rested on her shoulders:

Every time he hungry in there, or he lonely, or the guards is talking shit to him,
that’s on my head. Every time he miss his son—I did that to him.

THE TRUE RIDER

Overwhelmingly, women who come under police pressure cave: they cut off ties to the
man they had promised to protect, or they work with the police to get him arrested
and convicted. When this happens,
women suffer public humiliation and private shame, and face the difficult task of
salvaging their moral worth in the wake of their betrayals. Most often, the relationship
is permanently ruined; to salvage her dignity, the woman may start over with a new
man in a new social scene—perhaps a few blocks away, or better yet, in another neighborhood.
Four times I observed women pack up and move after being publicly labeled a snitch.

I witnessed a number of situations in which the police pressure never materialized.
The man turned himself in, or wasn’t pursued after all, or the police caught up to
him quickly and so didn’t get around to putting pressure on his girlfriend or relatives.
In these cases, the woman doesn’t have to manage her spoiled identity or reconstruct
her relationship, because she didn’t have to resort to betraying her boyfriend, brother,
or son.

In other cases, a woman is able to support and protect the man because the police
don’t connect her to him, and therefore don’t put pressure on her or her family directly.
Because a man’s main girlfriend and close relatives tend to be known to the police
and targeted for information, he often finds his inner circle untrustworthy, while
someone with whom he has a weaker connection—a new friend, an old girlfriend, or a
more distant cousin—turns out to be the true rider.

Most of the time, women who are identified by the police cave quickly under their
pressure. But a few women around 6th Street showed remarkable strength in resisting
them. Miss Linda’s ability to resist police pressure was widely recognized in the
6th Street community. As Mike once proclaimed to a small crowd assembled on her steps
after a raid, “She might be a thief and her house might be dirty as shit, but Miss
L ain’t talking. She don’t care if they bang her door in, she don’t give a fuck!”

Miss Linda would often say that she rode hard for her three sons because she had more
heart than other women, but the truth of the matter was that she also had more practice.
Chuck, Reggie, Tim, and their friends and associates brought the law to her house
on at least twenty-three occasions during my six years on 6th Street.
¹²

When her middle son, Reggie, was seventeen, the police stopped him for loitering on
the corner, and he allowed them to search him. An officer discovered three small bags
of crack in the lining of his jeans, and
Reggie started running. The cops lost him in the chase, and an arrest warrant was
issued for possession of drugs with intent to distribute.

That evening, Miss Linda prepared her house for the raid she seemed sure was coming.
She located the two guns that Reggie and his older brother, Chuck, had hidden in the
ceiling, and stashed them at a neighbor’s. She did the same with Chuck’s bulletproof
vest, his bullets, and the tiny plastic baggies he used to hold the small amounts
of crack he was selling at the time. She took her marijuana stash, along with her
various crack-smoking paraphernalia, to her boyfriend’s house three blocks up. And
after some effort, she secured accommodations for Chuck’s close friend Anthony, who
had been sleeping in their basement and had a bench warrant out for failure to appear.
She let her neighbors know that the police were coming so that their sons and cousins
could go elsewhere for the night. (This was in case the police got the wrong house,
which had happened before, or in case they decided to search the houses nearby.) She
dug out the sixty dollars Reggie had hidden in the wall, as the police typically take
whatever cash they find. She persuaded her father, Mr. George, to sleep at his girlfriend’s
place that night, in case “the law gives him a coronary.”

Though Miss Linda had instructed Reggie to leave the house before midnight, he fell
asleep by accident, and was still there when a three-man SWAT team busted the door
in at about four in the morning. (The door remains broken and unlocked to this day.)
Miss Linda had slept on the couch in preparation and, unsure if Reggie was still in
the house, launched into a heated argument with the officers to delay their going
upstairs. This ruse proved successful. According to Reggie, he was able to leave through
a window in his bedroom and run through the alley before they could catch him.

The next night, three officers returned and ordered Reggie’s younger brother, Tim,
and Mr. George to lie facedown on the floor with their hands on their heads while
they searched the house. According to Tim, an officer promised Miss Linda that if
she gave Reggie up, they would not tell him that she was the one who had betrayed
him. If she did not give her son up, the officer said he’d call Child Protective Services
and have her youngest son taken away, because the house was infested with roaches,
covered in cat shit, and unfit to live in. On this night, she again refused to tell
the police where Reggie was.

Shaken but triumphant, Miss Linda came out early the next morning to tell her friends
and neighbors the story. We sat on her iron back-porch steps that look out onto the
shared alleyway.

MISS LINDA: I do my dirt, I’m the first to admit it. Some people say I’m a bad mother.
You can say what you want about me, but everybody knows I protect my sons. All three
of them. These girls out here can talk all they want, but watch when the fucking law
comes BAM! knocks they door in. Don’t none of these girls know about that. They can
talk, but won’t none of them ride like me. Only some females is true riders, and I’m
one of them females. [
Takes a drag from her cigarette, nods her head confidently. Grins
.] They can come back every night.

When her cousin came to sit with us, Miss Linda repeated the story, adding that she
had deliberately worn her sexiest lingerie for the raid, and had proudly stuck out
her chest and butt when the officer was cuffing her against the wall. She acted this
out to shrieks of laughter. She said that she told a particularly good-looking officer,
“Honey, you so fine, you can search me anytime!”

Later in the day, more police officers came to search the house, and while they were
pulling it apart once again, Reggie phoned to see if they were still there and if
his mother was alright. Sitting not two feet from one of the officers, she coolly
replied, “Yeah, Mom-Mom. I got to call you back later, because the police are here
looking for Reggie. You haven’t seen him, have you? Okay, alright. I’ll call you back
later. I’ll pick up the Pampers when I go food shopping.”

When the police left, Miss Linda told me: “Big George [her father] is going to tell
me to clean this shit up as soon as he comes in. But I’m not cleaning till next week.
They’re going to keep coming, and I’m not putting this house back together every fucking
morning.”

I was there two nights later when the police raided Miss Linda’s house for the third
time. On this night, three officers put plastic cuffs on us and laid us facedown on
the living room floor while they searched the house. Despite her previous boasts of
telling off the police and propositioning them with “I got three holes, pick one,”
Miss Linda cried and screamed when they dropped her to the floor. An officer mentioned
that the family was lucky that Mr. George owned the house: if it were a
Section 8–subsidized building, Miss Linda and her sons could be immediately evicted
for endangering their neighbors and harboring a fugitive. (Indeed, I had seen this
happen recently to two other families.) Upstairs, the police found a gun that Miss
Linda couldn’t produce a permit for; they arrested her and took her to the police
station. When Tim and I picked her up that afternoon, she said she was told that she
would face gun charges unless she told the police where to find Reggie. They also
promised her anonymity, though she said she didn’t believe them for a second.