Sasha's First Gun Experience

Sasha's First Gun Experience

Yesterday my mom stopped by on her birthday to visit with Mary, meand our new baby Sasha for the afternoon. It was beautiful in Chicago, with bight sun and a perfect temperature that convinced the four of us and the dog to head down to the beach. I would walk with the dog, and Mary and my mom would talk while heading down with the stroller.

On the way through my neighborhood I saw several police cruisers driving the wrong way up a one-way street. This is quite common where I live; an ongoing tension exists between the police and black youth that have survived the gentrification process that several years ago hit its high water mark in Rogers Park.

As we came upon Bosworth Street we saw about four police cars parked in every direction. On the same block there is an elementary school and a high school that many neighborhood kids attend, and school was just getting out as we were walking by. On any typical day the Chicago police can be seen routing the kids away from each other and back to their apartments. It’s a general and predictable form of harassment that takes on all forms and varying degrees of intensity.

On this afternoon a few of the girls leaving school were talking like there had been some kind of a fight. One girl in particular was talking tough but there were no marks and so the fight was probably more like an argument and nothing physical. Walking behind the girls was a group of eight or nine young black men, probably about 14 or 15 years old. They had their backpacks on and were laughing, entertained I was guessing, by whatever altercation had just wrapped up.

As we got to the corner an unmarked police cruiser pulled up to the boys and a white officer jumped out of the car. Before he could take two steps he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the entire crowd of young men, demanding they get down on the ground. My mom, Mary and myself were all pretty shocked and it sent a chill through us standing no more than 20 feet away from this angry cop holding the trigger of a loaded firearm. The boys were far less affected, however, after having experienced it so many times. While I stopped to witness what was happening Mary and my mom continued with the kid and dog. The young men knew the general cop routine and laid on the ground face-first while additional police came over to search their backpacks and throw some additional intimidation into the situation.

I see this so often in Rogers Park that it feels like Johannesburg, and I normally stop to let the police know they are being watched. This time I leaned against a mailbox furious at the treatment of the young men. I know I had to look mad, far more so even than the people with the gun actually pointed at them. When the cop glanced over at me I was ready for him to tell me to move on but he instead began to look a little embarrassed and thought to put his gun away.

During these moments I have to make some connection to the kids or risk looking like some dopey white spectator. This time I caught the eye of one of the young men and shook my head in the direction of the cops. He smiled and went back to getting frisked.

After the cops were satisfied with their moment they said some harsh words of warning and started back into their cars. No one was arrested and no firearms, drugs or explosives were recovered. In the end, the police presence was totally gratuitous and produced nothing except the confirmation of where the lines were drawn.

It occurred to me that I may have been the only one breaking the rules of conduct. For his part, the lieutenant expected me to side with him from the beginning, and assume that these kids had done something so wrong that a threat to their lives was needed to control them. According to this scenario, I then should have thought about how I would eventually have to teach my daughter about crime and its victims and how we are thankful to have the brave arm of the law on our side.

These ideas came to me later on, after I had some time to settle myself down. In the moment, however, I felt a pain in my stomach and intense anger. Young men looking into the gun of a policeman is a daily occurrence in Chicago, as it is everywhere poverty exists. These scenes are the reality of my world, the world of these kids, and now Sasha's, too. All of us are here together.

As she gets older there will be many of these moments, I imagine, times of potential education that can help her to understand her world. Yesterday she wasn't even big enough to see above her stroller. She had no idea that the lives of several young men were being threatened by police only feet from where she was sleeping. In the future she wont be sleeping, and she will be big enough to see what is happening. It will be a role of fatherhood to make sure these facts of life don’t go unnoticed and unexplained. There is so much work to do.

The walk went fine after our encounter with the Chicago Police Department. The beach was bright and cool and the dog ran from end to end, chasing seagulls. All of us talked together about the warmth Sasha has brought to us since her arrival, and the darkness of that one moment on back on Bosworth. We tried to balance the two feelings the entire way home and were generally unsuccessful.

My mom left and took the train home. Her birthday was bittersweet, just like our little world in Rogers Park.