#2 On Straight Outta Compton

It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I didn’t sleep well last night. I completely freaked out about my qualifications as a dad, and that kept me up. I watched some Tony Bourdain and some West Wing, and at dawn I overdosed on the Henry Gates thing. Cops are evil, all of them. That’s not true, but as a Black male – no longer young Black male, yay I win – it’s a safe operating assumption. I’ve known five people that have become cops, all men, all violent action junkies. One of them was a very good car thief when he was a teen. Another was a very bad drug dealer. I don’t care about racist cops. Politics don’t mean anything when it comes to doing a job well. Wolfgang Puck may be a Holocaust denier, but that doesn’t mean he can’t cook – even latkes. I don’t think Chef Puck is a Nazi, but his ethnicity made for a nice sentence. I do care about being professional. Just do your job, and part of that job is taking crap from unhappy citizens. I’ve seen white males rage at cops and seen the cops ignore it, while they frisked the compliant and respectful me. I was in the passenger seat with a buddy in high school who was pulled over for doing eighty – EIGHT ZERO – in a thirty-five. The cop asked the driver, “Guess why I pulled you over?!?” trying to be witty I guess, and the driver responded deadpan, “Cuz yer a dick?” There was a lecture, a written warning, and a 9mm under the driver’s seat. There wasn’t a car search… for driving eighty in a thirty-five. I’ve gotten three moving violations in my life. They all happened within six months of each other. One was legitimate. I wrecked my aunt’s Pontiac 1000. The others were differing degrees of the same unwritten offense. I was ticketed for driving thirty-five in a forty-five – aka driving while Black in the wrong neighborhood – and I’m not dyslexic. I was also ticketed for reckless driving – aka driving while Black with a hot White chick in the wrong neighborhood. Barney Fife pointed a gun at me in the last case. I have a bunch of examples from my own personal experience of stuff like this, but my point is that, in my experience, cops are unprofessional. I mentioned four examples, and in three of those examples the cop did nothing but make the situation worse. Cory, the driver, learned there are no consequences for cocky Murray Hill rednecks. LJ went on to become another angry guy with dark skin. Like I said, cops may not all be evil, but if you’re male and you fail the brown paper bag test, it’s a safe assumption.