On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (6 page)

Chuck laughed. “I’m in the best shape of my life.” He explained that his shoulder
hurt only when he played basketball.

Reggie sat on a small leopard-print stool and said, “Name a fat motherfucker who runs
faster than me. Not just in the ’hood but anywhere in Philly.”

“Oh, here you go,” Chuck complained.

Chuck joked about the extensive shoe collection, saying you’d never know Miss Toya
was like that. Reggie pulled out a pair of suede high heels and attempted to get one
onto his foot, asking me to do up the straps. He got on her computer and started browsing
pit bull websites, then
YouTube videos of street fights. Chuck cringed and exclaimed loudly as Kimbo, a well-known
street fighter, hit his opponent repeatedly in the eye, revealing bloody and battered
tissue that Chuck called “spaghetti and meatballs.”

I asked Chuck why he made me run, and consequently dirty my sneakers, when I’m not
even wanted.

“It’s good practice.”

Reggie grinned and said, “You be taking your fucking time, A.”

“You’re no track star,” I replied.

“What!? I was haul-assing.”

Chuck got on the phone with his mother and then a neighbor to find out how many police
were on his block and for whom they had come. Apparently they were looking for a man
who had fled on foot after being stopped on an off-road motorbike. They didn’t find
this man, but did take two others from the house next door: one had a bench warrant
for failure to appear, and the other had a small amount of crack in his pocket. Into
the phone Chuck was saying, “Damn. They got Jay-Jay? Damn.”

About an hour later, his mother called to tell Chuck that the police had gone. We
waited another ten minutes, then left for Pappi’s, the corner store. Chuck ordered
Miss Toya a turkey hoagie and BBQ chips and brought them to her as thanks. We then
walked back to the block with Dutch cigars and sodas.

Running wasn’t always the smartest thing to do when the cops came, but the urge to
run was so ingrained that sometimes it was hard to stand still.

When the police came for Reggie, they blocked off the alleyway on both ends simultaneously,
using at least five cars that I could count from where I was standing, and then ran
into Reggie’s mother’s house. Chuck, Anthony, and two other guys were outside, trapped.
Chuck and these two young men were clean, but Anthony had the warrant for failure
to appear. As the police dragged Reggie out of his house, laid him on the ground,
and searched him, one guy whispered to Anthony to be calm and stay still. Anthony
kept quiet as Reggie was cuffed and placed in the squad car, but then he started whispering
that he thought Reggie was looking at him funny, and might say something to the police.
Anthony started sweating and twitching his hands; the two young men and I whispered
again to him to chill. One said, “Be easy. He’s not looking at you.”

We stood there, and time dragged on. When the police started searching the ground
for whatever Reggie may have tossed before getting into the squad car, Anthony couldn’t
seem to take it anymore. He started mumbling his concerns, and then he took off up
the alley. One of the officers went after him, causing the other young man standing
next to him to shake his head in frustrated disappointment.

Anthony’s running caused the other officer to put the two young men still standing
there up against the car, search them, and run their names; luckily, they came back
clean. Then two more cop cars came up the alley, sirens on. About five minutes after
they finished searching the young men, one of the guys got a text from a friend up
the street. He silently handed me the phone so I could read it:

Anthony just got booked. They beat the shit out of him
.

At the time of this incident, Chuck had recently begun allowing Anthony to sleep in
the basement of his mother’s house, on the floor next to his bed. So it was Chuck’s
house that Anthony phoned first from the police station. Miss Linda picked up and
began yelling at him immediately.

“You fucking stupid, Anthony! Nobody bothering you, nobody looking at you. What the
fuck did you run for? You a nut. You a fucking nut. You deserve to get locked up.
Dumb-ass nigga. Call your sister, don’t call my phone. And when you come home, you
can find somewhere else to stay.”

.   .   .

When the techniques young men deploy to avoid the police fail, and they find themselves
cuffed against a wall or cornered in an alleyway, all is not lost: once caught, sometimes
they practice concerted silence, create a distraction, advocate for their rights,
or threaten to sue the police or go to the newspapers. I occasionally saw each of
these measures dissuade the police from continuing to search a man or question a man
on the street. When young men are taken in, they sometimes use the grate in the holding
cell at the police station to scrape their fingertips down past the first few layers
of skin, so that the police can’t obtain
the prints necessary to identify them and attach them to their already pending legal
matters. On four separate occasions I saw men from 6th Street released with bloody
fingertips.

AVOIDING THE POLICE AND THE COURTS WHEN SETTLING DISPUTES

It’s not enough to run and hide when the police approach. A man intent on staying
out of jail cannot call the police when harmed, or make use of the courts to settle
disputes. He must forego the use of the police and the courts when he is threatened
or in danger and find alternative ways to protect himself. When Mike returned from
a year upstate, he was rusty in these sensibilities, having been living most recently
as an inmate rather than as a fugitive. His friends wasted no time in reacquainting
him with the precariousness of life on the outside.

Mike had been released on parole to a halfway house, which he had to return to every
day before curfew. When his mother went on vacation, he invited a man he had befriended
in prison to her house to play video games. The next day, Mike, Chuck, and I went
back to the house and found Mike’s mother’s stereo, DVD player, and two TVs gone.
Later, a neighbor told Mike that he had seen the man taking these things from the
house in the early morning.

Once the neighbor identified the thief, Mike debated whether to call the police. He
didn’t want to let the robbery go, but he also didn’t want to take matters into his
own hands and risk violating his parole. Finally, he called the police and gave them
a description of the man. When we returned to the block, Reggie and another friend
admonished Mike about the risks he had taken:

REGGIE: And you on parole! You done got home like a day ago! Why the fuck you calling
the law for? You lucky they ain’t just grab [arrest] both of you.

FRIEND: Put it this way: they ain’t come grab you like you ain’t violate shit, they
ain’t find no other jawns [warrants] in the computer. Dude ain’t pop no fly shit [accused
Mike of some crime in an attempt to reduce his own charges], but simple fact is you
filed a statement, you know what I’m saying, gave them niggas your government [real
name]. Now they
got your mom’s address in the file as your last known [address]. The next time they
come looking for you, they not just going to your uncle’s, they definitely going to
be through there [his mother’s house].

In this case, their counsel proved correct. Mike returned to the halfway house a few
days later and discovered that the guards there were conducting alcohol tests. He
left before they could test him, assuming he would test positive and spend another
year upstate for the violation. He planned to live on the run for some time, but three
days later the police found him at his mother’s house and took him into custody. We
had been playing video games, and he had gone across the street to change his clothes
at the Laundromat. Two unmarked cars pulled up, and three officers got out and started
chasing him. He ran for two blocks before they threw him down on the pavement. Later,
he mentioned that their knowledge of his mother’s new address must have come from
the time he reported the robbery, and he bemoaned his thoughtlessness in calling them.

Young men also learn to see the courts as dangerous. A year after Chuck came home
from the assault case, he enrolled in a job training program for young men who have
not completed high school, hoping to earn his high school diploma and gain a certificate
in construction. He proudly graduated at twenty-two and found a job apprenticing on
a construction crew. Around this time he had been arguing with his baby-mom, and she
stopped allowing him to see their two daughters, ages one and a half and six months.
After considerable hesitation, Chuck took her to family court to file for partial
custody. He said it tore at him to let a white man into his family affairs, but what
could he do? He needed to see his kids. At the time, Chuck was also sending thirty-five
dollars per month to the city toward payment on tickets he had received for driving
without a license or registration; he hoped to get into good standing and become qualified
to apply for a driver’s license. The judge said that if Chuck did not meet his payments
on time every month, he would issue a bench warrant for his arrest.
⁴
Then Chuck could work off the traffic tickets he owed in county jail (fines and fees
can be deducted for every day spent in custody).

Five months into his case for partial custody in family court, Chuck lost his construction
job and stopped making the payments to the city
for the traffic tickets. He said he wasn’t sure if he had actually been issued a warrant,
and unsuccessfully attempted to discover this. He went to court for the child custody
case anyway the next month, and when his baby-mom mentioned that he was a drug dealer
and unfit to get partial custody of their children, the judge immediately ran his
name in the database to see if any warrants came up. They did not. As we walked out
of the courthouse, Chuck said to me and to his mother:

I wanted to run [when the clerk ran his name], but it was no way I was getting out
of there—it was too many cops and guards. But my shit came back clean, so I guess
if they’re going to give me a warrant for the tickets, they ain’t get around to it
yet.

The judge ruled in Chuck’s favor and granted him visitation on Sundays at a court-supervised
day-care site. These visits, Chuck said, made him anxious: “Every time I walk in the
door I wonder, like, is it today? Are they going to come grab me, like, right out
of the day care? I can just see [my daughter’s] face, like, ‘Daddy, where you going?’
”

After a month, the conditions of his custody allowed Chuck to go to his baby-mom’s
house on the weekends to pick up his daughters. He appeared thrilled with these visits,
because he could see his children without having to interact with the courts and risk
any warrant that might come up.

.   .   .

If, in the past, residents of poor Black communities could not turn to the police
to protect themselves or settle disputes because the police were so often absent and
uninterested, now it seems that residents face an additional barrier: they cannot
turn to the police because their legal entanglements prevent them from doing so. The
police are everywhere, but as guarantors of public safety, they are still out of reach.

The hesitancy of legally precarious men to turn to the authorities has some important
implications. First, steering clear of the police and the courts means that young
men tend not to use the ordinary resources of the law to protect themselves from crimes
committed against them.
⁵
While those on probation or parole may make tentative use of these resources (and
sometimes regret it later, when the police arrest them us
ing new information they provided), men with warrants typically stay away. During
my first year and a half on 6th Street, I noted twenty-four instances of men contacting
the police when they were injured, robbed, or threatened. These men were either in
good standing with the courts or had no pending legal constraints. I did not observe
any person with a warrant call the police or voluntarily make use of the courts during
the six years of the study. Indeed, these young men seemed to view the authorities
only as a threat to their safety.

Ned, age forty-three, and his longtime girlfriend Jean, age forty-six, lived on Mike’s
block. Jean smoked crack pretty heavily, although Chuck noted that she could handle
her drugs, meaning she was able to maintain both a household and her addiction. Ned
was unemployed and for extra money occasionally hosted dollar parties—house parties
with a dollar entrance fee offering drinks, food, and games for a dollar each. He
also engaged in petty fraud, such as intercepting checks in the mail and stealing
credit cards. The couple’s primary income came from taking in foster children. When
Ned and Jean discovered they might be kicked out of their house because they owed
property taxes to the city, Jean called Reggie’s cousin, telling him to come to the
house because she had some gossip concerning his longtime love interest. When he arrived,
a man in a hoodie robbed him at gunpoint. Reggie later remarked that his cousin should
have known better than to go to Ned and Jean’s house: as the only man on the block
with a warrant out for his arrest at the time, he was an easy target for a couple
under financial strain.

If young men known to have a warrant become the target of those looking for someone
to exploit or even to rob, they may resort to violence themselves, for protection
or for revenge.

One winter morning, Chuck, Mike, and I were at a diner having breakfast to celebrate
that the authorities hadn’t taken Mike into custody after his court appearance earlier
that day. Chuck’s mother called to tell him that his car had been firebombed outside
her house, and that firefighters were putting out the blaze. According to Chuck, the
man who set fire to his car had given him drugs to sell on credit, under the arrangement
that Chuck would pay him once he sold the drugs. Chuck hadn’t been able to pay, however,
because the police had taken the money from his pockets when they searched him earlier
that week.
This was the first car that Chuck had ever purchased legally, a 1994 Bonneville he
had bought the week before for four hundred dollars from a used-car lot in Northeast
Philadelphia. He didn’t speak for the rest of the meal. Then, as we walked to Mike’s
car, he said: