For years, I’ve wanted to tell the story of when I was arrested by the Chicago police and watched as they beat up my best friend, but I was too afraid to share it publicly. I made it all the way to the Cook County jail that night. The recent news of Dexter Reed who was killed by Chicago police in a hail of 96 bullets after being stopped for a seatbelt violation finally convinced me to write about it.
It was a Saturday night, September 25, 2005, after midnight, I was on my way to drop off my friend Jeremiah at his dad’s house in Englewood, a Black neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago most people only read about in the news. I was driving up to the intersection at 55th and Damen, when I noticed a cop car come up behind us and turn on the red and blue lights. I pulled over to the curb.
Two white women police officers walked up to my car, one approaching from the driver’s side, the other on the passenger’s side. The one who I later found out was named Murphy told me to get out of the car. They did not ask for my driver’s license or proof of insurance. Murphy immediately started searching the car.
I later found out we were issued four traffic tickets: failure to use a turn signal; driving without insurance; and, lastly, Jeremiah and I were both ticketed for not wearing our seatbelts. These were obviously charges stacked against us to justify the illegal stop and search. This “pretextual” traffic stop is a tactic straight out of the playbook of the Chicago police, as the recent shooting of Dexter Reed reveals.
Searching my car, it didn’t take Officer Murphy long to go through my backpack and discover a Ziploc bag of weed. Murphy tossed the bag on the top of the car. She told me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. I did so and she locked handcuffs around my wrists.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jeremiah take off running. Maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe it was instinct from growing up Black in Englewood. Jeremiah believed he had done nothing wrong. His dad’s house was just a block away. The other cop ran after him and called for backup.
Jeremiah got to his dad’s house, but the front door was locked. The police caught up to him, pepper sprayed him, threw him down on the concrete sidewalk, and put him in handcuffs. Cops were yelling, making threats. The neighbors came out on their porches to see what was happening.
Murphy put me in the back of the squad car. I remember there was a stray cat in the back seat they must have picked up. Murphy warned me that I’d better not do anything to the cat, or else. I’m a cat person, I couldn’t imagine hurting a cat.
Too Ashamed
I was driven around the block and we stopped in front of Jeremiah’s house where cops cars had arrived and lights were flashing. I watched from the back seat of the squad car, but I had to look away from what I saw — the police were beating up my friend.
Murphy took me out of the back of the squad car and put me into a paddy wagon. Soon after, they put Jeremiah in the back with me. I noticed he had a split lip and above his right eye was a golf-ball size lump from being punched by one of the cops.
I’ve long wanted to tell what happened publicly but was ashamed of getting busted with weed. It was also too traumatic to share that I witnessed my best friend get beat up by the police — for something that was maybe my fault. I quit smoking five years ago, and now that marijuana is legal, there’s less of a stigma. It’s been almost 20 years since I was arrested, so there’s been time to reflect.
Jeremiah and I had a long-distance friendship after first meeting in Ohio. He was part of the reason I decided to move from Los Angeles to Illinois in 2004, I would have a friend in Chicago. Shortly after I arrived, I went to visit Jeremiah and hold his second daughter who was just six months old. I saw Jeremiah last week and went out to dinner with his wife and my girlfriend. We remain best friends and every once in a while we talk briefly about what happened that night in Chicago.
Don’t You Know This Is A Drug Zone?
Next, Jeremiah and I were taken to the police station. We sat on metal slabs in a police office. Handcuffs on my right wrist, and handcuffs on Jeremiah’s left wrist were both locked to a ring on the wall. Ever since that night, I’ve thought of Jeremiah and I as bound together by this experience — literally and figuratively. Jeremiah’s eyes were still burning from the pepper spray, and I could see his swollen eye more clearly in the light.
Police wanted to know what we were doing in Englewood. “Don’t you know this is a drug zone?” they questioned. Their assumption was that if a white boy and a Black boy were together, they were dealing drugs.
Then the police went to work trumping up the charges against us. Jeremiah was charged with battery of a police officer. When other male police officers heard this — what sounded as if Jeremiah had punched a woman police officer — they started making more serious threats. They told Jeremiah they were going to “box” his ears and give him another beating. Describing Jeremiah’s agility while fleeing, I heard Murphy say, “They’re all animals.”
Jeremiah was wearing an argyle sweater, for which police jokingly called him “Tiger Woods.” When I told them I taught at the University of Illinois, they mockingly referred to us as, “The Professor and Gilligan,” from the TV show Gilligan’s Island.
After concocting a case against us, they put us in two separate jail cells. Through a small window in the door we could see one another across the hallway. It was a relatively modern jail cell, there were no bars, just cinder block walls and a steel door. The floor was wet from being mopped, so it was clean. But the cell was still cold and dank, even though it was a warm September night. I had to tuck my arms into my shirt to try to stay warm. I tried to sleep on the concrete slab, but it made my hip hurt, the florescent lights were on all night, and I was too worried.
This is not Burger King
In the early hours of the morning, I was shipped off to the Cook County jail, likely intended to teach me a “lesson.” Jeremiah was left behind and I was now alone.
At the time, the population at the Cook County jail was at an all-time high, with around 10,000 people (today, the population has been cut by half, thanks to activists who have pushed for bail reform). It is the largest single-site jail in the country, at 26th Street and California.
Apparently, the cops didn’t have a scale at the station. They charged me with 30 grams of marijuana, over an ounce, which constituted a felony, allowing them to send me to Cook County jail.
I was put in another paddy wagon with about a dozen men. We were told by the cop as we were loaded into the truck, “This is not Burger King — you don’t get it your way.” He was a middle-aged Black man who wore an Afrocentric red, black, and green pin on his uniform. He said he transported 400 people every day. If we coughed or sneezed, we were instructed to cover our mouths. Indeed, I caught a nasty cold that hung on for several weeks after.
When we got to the Cook County jail, I was put into a bullpen with nearly 50 other men. There were no chairs, some sat on the dirty floor, most stood around swapping stories of how they ended up there.
I heard one of the guys say that the guards threw a coat over a surveillance camera. Then I heard a scuffle in the hallway. The guards opened the door and ushered a young, middle-class looking white kid into our bullpen. The kid’s face was flush red and he had dusty boot marks all over his clothes. He was a heroin addict who had gotten the shakes and angered the guards. They gave him a beat down in the hallway out of sight from the video camera.
Among the others in the bullpen were Russian gangsters who were caught stealing Cadillac Escalades. There was a guy who was found with 18 bags of crack in the trunk of his car after someone snitched on him. Another guy was caught selling weed. There was a pretty trans youth with long black hair who cowered in fear. I watched a homeless person hide a bag of crack rocks in his shoe. A middle-aged man with a family was worried he would lose his job.
You Don’t Have Any Rights In Here
Around noon, guards lined up everyone to go in front of a judge. I watched as they called out people one by one, but I was left behind. My name was finally called, and I was taken out of the bullpen. I asked a woman guard where they were taking me, “I have a right to know,” I said. “You don’t have any rights in here,” she told me. I was put in another paddy wagon all by myself. It had no idea where I was going. It was the longest ride I’ve ever taken.
I arrived back at the police station. A cop told me I was lucky, I was only being charged for a misdemeanor. They must have found a scale at the station to measure my bag of weed — 14 grams, half an ounce — well under the felony limit. Thirty minutes later I was released on my own recognizance with date to return to court. Jeremiah was also getting out about the same time. We met and hugged in front of the station. It was the end of our 12 hours in the custody of the Chicago police.
A month later, we showed up in court, and our charges were dropped. I suspect at least one of the neighbors saw what happened and could testify to excessive force. The Chicago police had bigger fish to fry.
Back home in Urbana-Champaign, I had already started to write articles as a burgeoning community journalist for the Independent Media Center. But it was that night in 2005 that changed everything — I witnessed first-hand the brutality and lawlessness of the police, on the street and behind jail walls. At that point, I took it personally. I became committed to using my writing and research skills to expose the police and fight the prison beast. This was years before the revelations of Ferguson, before Laquan McDonald, before Dexter Reed.
Indeed, I learned my lesson that weekend, but not the one I was supposed to learn.
The “rights” we take for granted are only on paper. On a street corner in a “bad neighborhood,” individual rights don’t exist. Behind the walls of our jails and prisons, there are no rights. Outside the view of cellphones and body cams, anything can happen.
This is a fact of life well-known to most Black and Brown people. Those who are identified as white, like myself, even with degrees or the ability to afford a lawyer, we can also be victim to the whims of a police officer or jail guard. So long as one group of people has no rights, none of us do.
As Maya Angelou once said, “no one of us can be free until everybody is free.”
Thanks for posting about what must have been a traumatic experience. Your comments about the invasion of citizens' rights are both hard to argue with and chilling.
Thanks for sharing your experience with CPD. This happened nearly two decades ago and it is apparent that not much has changed with CPD. They are still under a Consent Decree from the Obama Justice Department and they have not complied with most of the recommendations. The past two Superintendents came from the Rank and File, and the Police Union do not appear to want to take corrective action. The Superintendent wants to keep officers with many Excessive Force complaints on the their record even when COPA advises that they should be fired. As we can see, 20 years and still not much have changed with CPD.