Policing The Hovel

I'm going to tell you a little story about my encounters with the police over the years. For most of my life I've had little interaction with police. And the few that I've had were pretty innocuous - traffic tickets mostly. But for a few years in the early 2000's I lived in an apartment that I have dubbed "The Hovel", and saw a different side of the police. 

One of the things that things that has been talked about in light of the revelations that the five Memphis police officers charged with murder were Black, is that it's not simply a matter of White cops killing Black people. It is, but that simplistic narrative ignores the related narrative that it's all police preying on anyone who is looked down upon, who has no influence, no power, who is at the bottom of society. Usually that means White cops brutalizing young Black men, because (1) the majority of cops are White and (2) Young Black Men are perceived to fall into the "bottom" category, whether they deserve to be or not. Black cops often absorb the mindset and are certainly not going to go pulling over rich White people to harass. 

The Hovel was an old railroad apartment on the 100 block of South 17th Street. It was falling down and had myriad code violations. I moved in after my first wife threw me out of the house because I needed a cheap place to live, fast. The twelve apartments housed a motley collection of souls, most on some sort of government assistance, but to my knowledge only one instance of actual law-breaking. But for some reason the Lincoln Police were regular visitors to our building, knocking (actually, "pounding") on doors in the middle of the night, harassing tenants as they came and went and stomping through the halls at all hours. Having had fairly cordial relations with the police for my whole life, I at first assumed that they must have a legitimate reason to be in the building, I couldn't imagine that they were treating the residents poorly because they were poor and powerless, and automatic suspects because of the horrible living conditions. On a few occasions when I encountered the police during daylight hours I would attempt to be friendly and saw that there was no "they", there was just "us". I could tell from how I was being treated that not only was living in this rundown building evidence to the police of some criminal activity, but that I was suspect as well...just because of where I lived. 

Neither I, nor any of my fellow Hovel residences (okay, there was one) were criminals, or caused any problems for the police, yet it was assumed, because we lived in slum-like conditions in a "bad" neighborhood, that we must be up to something nefarious. To my knowledge, the police presence never escalated into violence during my time there, but their assumption that we were somehow beneath them stuck with me. 

I have no problem believing that the attitude is widespread and not at all unique to that time and that place.