Obvious-ology

[from 6/3/09]

"I don't know why he ran."

That's been a common refrain these days. It goes like this. Person is out and about. Cop says, "Hey! You!" Person runs like hell. Cop catches up to person and beats person senseless. Then, there are hours of justification for said beating. One such justification is, "I don't know why he ran." Or the common variation, "I don't know why he'd run if he was innocent."

I consider it my duty, and indeed my calling in life, to step in whenever I hear someone floundering in their own self vomited ignorance, to drag them heads up into the clarity that comes from going, "Duh, maybe someone could tell me, 'cause I can't figure it out myself."

So I will now endeavor to explain why innocent people run from police. I will start with the least important reasons and work my way to the most important.

Sport and/or exercise. When I was 14, Seattle had a curfew for minors, but I went to a basketball game between my school and local radio DJs which let out past curfew time. Walking home, me and my buddies were spotted by cops in a squad car. They jumped out and came for us, so we ran like gazelles for the half mile to home. Unencumbered skinny adolescent boys 1, donut-waisted gun-toting 30-somethings, 0. Good times.

Political gesture. In the early 70s, I was watching from what I thought was a safe distance when police in riot gear attacked about two hundred peaceful marchers protesting the Vietnam War, cracking billy clubs on heads. The crowd dispersed, only to have tear gas canisters tossed at them for good measure. Someone threw one back and that made the police mad. So they really started cracking heads then, in all directions, and one of them came running after me. I ran like a gazelle the three blocks home. My political gesture: "Not my head, lard ass." Good times. Not as good as before, owing to the beginnings of disco, but still, pretty good.

Was that a cop? Sometimes you just don't know. You hear someone say "Hey! You! Come here!" Maybe you think, "I'm about to be robbed." You run without even looking back to see the uniform. Or it's an off-duty cop and there's no uniform. Or he says he's an off-duty cop, but how many times have you heard that line, and been mugged by a lying thief? So you run.

But the #1 reason is one of the same reasons the police give for using what looks like excessive force on us civilians. They tell us their adrenaline gets all pumped up because they're in danger all the time from us. We might hurt one of them.

Well, yeah. I get that. But, here's the surprise: We're scared of the police, too. And, this is very important: We have an absolute right to be afraid of them.

In fact, the police use fear as one of their means to control us. So they have no excuse for not expecting people to react to them from fear.

Case in point: Last week police in Harlem shot and killed one of their own essentially because he forgot his training. He was off-duty pursuing a suspect, with his gun in his hand, and when police told him to drop it he goofed and turned to face them instead. Hello? I was never trained to not turn to face the police. That could have been me. Now I know: Don't turn around. How about I run like a gazelle while I'm at it?

In April, in Detroit, a 16 year-old boy ran away from police when the car he was a passenger in was stopped for an expired license plate. He was caught and died by taser. The Detroit commissioner said police who watch someone run from them "can only assume he committed a crime or is wanted for a crime."

They can't assume anything else? They're that ignorant?