Life & Culture

The Call

It was confirmed yesterday: we live in one of those neighborhoods where neighbors—grown, adult neighbors—get into fistfights. Perhaps it was a once-in-a-decade event, but it has somewhat darkened my view of the neighborhood. Particularly after Bellevue. Peaceful Bellevue. There, people didn’t attack one another in the street. A fight was the neighbor looking the other way when you said hi. Bellevue violence, in its rare manifestations, tended to be private and self-inflicted. You heard a muffled pop in the night, if that. Nothing to disturb your sleep. You didn’t know anything had happened until the police cordoned off the house down the street and told you to move along. Looking back, perhaps Bellevue’s style was quiet desperation.

But here, yesterday, right out in the street, it was open rage: yelling, cursing, threatening, children crying. Wendy, from her studio, said, “Do you hear that?” I opened my office window and heard enough of what was being said to know it was serious. I put on my shoes. “Should I go try to break it up?”

“No.”

As I was heading out the front door, Wendy said, “I’m calling the police.”

I said, “Don’t call the police. They’ll just fuck everything up.”

I believe this was the first time I had articulated my current position on law enforcement in America.

It wasn’t always quite so negative. Long ago, living in Echo Park, we called the police on a regular basis, once lying on the floor of our bedroom while people shot at each other next door. Even then we didn’t reflexively love the cops, but we relied on them to temporarily stop the mayhem.

Something has changed. Our neighborhood, for one. Mayhem is not the norm here, so we generally think differently about our neighbors. But our perception of the police has also changed. We’ve read too many stories, seen too many videos. I’m not saying all cops are bad. There are good officers out there—but even the good ones carry a loaded gun and too much leeway to use it. And you may not get a good one.

We live on a hill, and from the porch we could clearly see the confrontation in the street a half block below us, a heavy-set black man and a thinner, younger-looking white man. It was getting to the point of punching, but others had arrived who seemed to know both men, and they were trying to talk them down. It looked like it was working, but then abruptly it didn’t, and the men were on each other. When the bystanders got them apart, Wendy said, “If that guy wasn’t black I’d call the police.”

This is our current predicament. Two raging adults come to blows, and as a bystander you have to assess the situation and decide whether a police call is warranted. If you do nothing, one of those guys could kill the other. If you make the call, the cops could kill one of the men. Probably the black man.

So yesterday we, two middle-class liberal white people, found ourselves making the same calculation that residents of poor black neighborhoods have made for years. For centuries, probably. How bad does a situation have to get before you put aside your fear that the police will just make it worse?

Family members walked one guy back to his house and it seemed to be over, but a moment later he burst out the door and someone yelled, “He’s got a gun!”

That was it. Wendy ran into the house. “I’m calling the police now!”

I watched the man charge across the street, then yelled inside to Wendy, “Don’t call, Wendy, it’s just a baseball bat.”

I guess it says something that an angry man wielding a baseball bat doesn’t reach the 911 threshold for me. If it were the white guy with the bat it might, but it wasn’t. By my estimation the worst-case scenario would be the police showing up and confronting a black man with a baseball bat. Compared to that, the odds against the white guy getting brained were pretty good, I thought. I saw a few mitigating factors. First, the man was holding the bat in the middle, out in front of him, like he didn’t quite know what he was going to do with it. Second, there were still several people standing between him and his adversary. Third, his little girl was pulling at him and crying, “Daddy! Daddy!”

I was right. He walked straight into the group of bystanders and let them take the bat from him. Then he simply went back to his house.

I was right but I could have been wrong, and I don’t like having to make that kind of decision. That calculation. In a different world we would have called the police, knowing that they would come and calmly talk everyone back into their homes. They would be firm but friendly, and might even crack a joke to defuse the situation. We would not for a moment think that they would draw their guns, let alone shoot someone.

We don’t live in that world anymore.

Image: Modified photograph of fighting bears. Original by Brad Josephs. Found at Earth Touch News, https://www.earthtouchnews.com/in-the-field/in-the-field/in-photos-the-stunning-power-of-grizzly-bear-battles/

Posted on July 21, 2017 at 8:22 am under Life & Culture

Comments closed.