COLUMN: Cause to be nervous

From Cila Warncke's, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," Fall '00 From Cila Warncke's, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," Fall '00Just over one month ago, the Supreme Court ruled that if a person is seen running from the police they are liable to be pursued, detained and searched. At first glance, this is a fair and reasonable assumption -- at least it seems that way to a Caucasian female like me, who grew up in ever-so-laid-back Oregon. But what if I was from Los Angeles, or New Jersey, or -- heaven forbid! -- New York City? Moreover, what if I was black or Hispanic, and maybe lived in a not-so-nice part of town? Would I strut confidently past police officers then, without looking the least "nervous" or "evasive?" The answer, in the grim light of accumulating news accounts, is no. Like that other peculiar American horror, school shootings, the number of shocking police brutality cases just seems to keep multiplying. Who can forget Amadou Diallo, the young West African immigrant who died as four white police officers fired at him more than 40 times? Their excuse? He looked as though he might have had a gun -- not that they bothered to check before pumping him full of lead as he stood in his vestibule. Even proto-fascist Rudolph Giuliani got defensive after that and was quoted by CNN as saying that the rising number of complaints about police conduct was merely a by-product of the increasing size of the police force. Funny, the size of the police force should only make a difference if you continue to hire abusive officers. Keep up the good work, Mr. Giuliani. More charming still was New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir, who when asked about the reports of police misconduct, huffed that it is "certainly not unique to New York City." How reassuring. He was right though; it isn't just New York. Back in December 1998, there was a case in Riverside, Calif., where four police officers shot to death a 19-year-old black girl while she sat in her car at a gas station. The justification? They claimed she had a gun on her lap. Curious story, though, isn't it? They must have had to approach her car and bend down to peer in the window (in order to even see the gun). And in that space of time, she neither raised a weapon nor attempted to flee. Her presence alone inspired enough fear in these four grown men that they had to react with deadly force. Of course, there is a fresh scandal in the news now, big enough to grab headlines even in Britain. "How the LAPD's gangbusting division became a death squad" cried last Friday's The Independent. Cringing, I read the article, which called the division in question, "a unit that routinely shot people without justification, framed them for crimes they did not commit, and got away with it." Ironically, I had been watching a video the night before with two British friends. One scene depicted the black protagonist being chased by two policemen. Running through a diner, they open fire on him, spraying the establishment with bullets. My friends glanced at each other, "They'd never do that, you wouldn't just start shooting at someone in a restaurant." "Actually, it's set in L.A.," I replied. "You never know." On opening the newspaper the next morning, my flip comment came back to settle bitterly on my tongue. For once it would be nice to have been wrong, to have been exaggerating, rather than realizing -- once again -- just how hard it is to hyperbolize the ills of American law enforcement. This seems to have slipped the mind of the Honorable William Rehnquist. He assumed, in writing his decision, that nervousness and evasiveness equate with a guilty conscience -- and that flight must be a certain signal of wrongdoing. Don't blame him though, he probably hasn't been to the Bronx or South Central Los Angeles lately. The streets there are a lot rougher than the marble halls of the Supreme Court building. Maybe Rehnquist doesn't realize that people there fear the police because they've been given cruel reason to. Maybe he and his four fellow justices have failed to appreciate the fact that fleeing is a survival thing -- and in an environment where the police operate unchecked by law or conscience, "headlong flight" might be the best chance a person has.