Quarantine Diary #108 6/30/2020 Woke Neighbors

I was quietly sitting here, just writing, when I heard yelling. I looked up and there was Modern America Right Here Right Now, in front of my house.

Cops had a car pulled over and were yelling at someone to come out. A black man with dreadlocks got out, hands in air, protesting and arguing to the cops. I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but he was arguing respectfully. I heard his “Sir” several times. He was not swearing that I could hear.

There were about eight or nine cops. All white, all positioned behind their various cop car doors; I think there were five cars for a while. They all had guns trained on the guy. One was a long gun. While I was trying to comprehend what I was seeing the cop with the long gun shot it. He did. A cop with a long gun shot down my street this morning. The shot was some kind of “non-lethal” projectile because the guy screamed and after that he limped.

I was safely upstairs in my office yet I felt real disbelief and fear as I looked at all those real guns pointed at that one man. Because he did not respond fast enough to move TOWARDS those guns and cops, they shot him. He was already outside his car, hands up, moving slowly towards them and trying to talk, when they shot at him.

By now I was using the camera function of my phone to record what was going on. The guy had his hands up in the air and when they said higher, he put them higher. More screaming vehicles arrived. More cops yelled more hard-to-decipher instructions. I heard crying from the car.

My office window has a screen so it it’s impossible to shoot a clear photo through it. I went downstairs to my glassed-in front porch and continued to use my phone to capture what I was witnessing.

Cops ordered the woman who had been driving, from the car. She looked terrified and held her hands as high as possible while they called her over. I don’t know her “race”; she just looked very American to me. Cops came to the car, checked it out for a while, opened the trunk. After that, some cops accompanied the woman back to the car to get her tiny infant who was in a baby carrier in the back seat.

For another twenty minutes a posse of cops looked in the front yards along that side of the street. A neighbor said later they picked up their small bags of bean-shot. I don’t know the correct terminology, but they picked up what they had shot at the suspect. They looked hard and for quite a while. The neighbor said even though it is “non-lethal” it created a divot in her lawn.

The incident is over now.

While it was going on, I and several neighbors were using our phones to document what was happening. One could occasionally see a cop scan the fronts of all our houses. We were all on our front porches, just standing, watching, usually with phones up.

When they finally allowed the woman to return to her car, she looked at all of us and raised her arm high and waved to us. We waved back and yelled, “If you need video, we have it!”

Looking at my neighbors, none of whom I know well, I felt Dr. King’s arc of the universe bending.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Maybe the cops were keeping our community safe from a bad guy. Maybe they were overreaching to arrest one black man with dreadlocks because a black man with dreadlocks somewhere committed a crime. I don’t know.

But our suppositions were not neutral. And we were watching.

…

PS: Len called the Waukesha Police Department a few weeks ago to ask if they use body cameras.

They do not.