Wrongful arrests and detainments aren’t one-off incidents. They’re endemic, and they have tremendous repercussions for not just individuals but families, particularly those with good reason to fear contact with law enforcement—namely, people of color. Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson feared for their lives after police arrested them in a Philadelphia Starbucks last week.
Robinson said he thought about his loved ones and how the afternoon had taken such a turn as he was taken to jail. Nelson wondered if he'd make it home alive.
"Anytime I'm encountered by cops, I can honestly say it's a thought that runs through my mind," Nelson said. "You never know what's going to happen."
The trauma of arrest was followed by isolation and imprisonment.
Nelson and Robinson spent hours in a jail cell with no outside contact and no sense of what would happen next. They were released after midnight, when the district attorney declined to prosecute them for trespassing. They had no idea the video of their arrests was making the rounds on the internet.
It’s no wonder Nelson and Robinson feared for their lives given stories like that of Tyler Lumar, who died Wednesday, more than a year after he attempted suicide while in custody after being wrongfully detained by police in Chicago.
Police were called after Lumar, who was African American, became upset at a clinic and allegedly threw papers and made a threat when a physician wouldn’t refill his cough medication. Left out of the call, and immediate coverage, was that this was Lumar’s first visit since his longtime doctor died and the new physician was, well, racist, according to Lumar.
“I’m so tired of racism, bro,” Lumar said outside the clinic, according to a Chicago police squad car dashcam recording of the encounter, alleging the incident began when the doctor accused Lumar, who has no criminal record, of reselling his prescription drugs. “That’s racial profiling. I don’t gangbang, I went to Oak Park and River Forest (High School). I played baseball.”
The police released Lumar without charge only to stop him again minutes later, wrongfully detaining him on a warrant for an ostensibly overdue $25 fine in a traffic misdemeanor case he’d already paid. In custody, he was charged with a second crime after a packet of crack cocaine was found near him, even though he’d been searched multiple times and security footage shows another inmate threw the drugs at him.
Within a day of his arrest, Lumar was found hanging by his own shirt; he’d suffered massive brain injuries by the time he was discovered. Only then did police drop charges. He remained on life support for more than a year and was ultimately transferred to the rehabilitation facility where he died.
Not only should Lumar not have been arrested or detained, he should have been allowed to leave: Given a $500 bond, Lumar needed to post just $50 to leave; he had $130 with him when he was arrested. Officers concealed that option from him.
Zooming out, the implications of racial profiling and wrongful arrest writ large are huge, especially when a neighborhood or community is targeted.
Anxiety about racial bias is well-founded.
[A] team of academics from Stanford University’s Open Policing project has spent two years amassing a trove of 130m traffic stops from 31 state police agencies. Their data, released this week, find that between 2011 and 2015 black drivers were stopped by the police twice as often as white drivers, suggesting that there is indeed something to the idea that “driving while black” is an offence.
Traumatic contact with law enforcement increases the odds of future exposure to the criminal justice system.
[H]ypervigilance and hostility could lead to more escalation in interactions with police, which increases the likelihood of being taken into custody even in the absence of a substantiated criminal charge later. This suggests the potenital [sic] for a cyclical relationship between trauma exposure and contact with the criminal justice system.
For those not just wrongfully arrested but convicted, the effects of long-term imprisonment resemble those encountered by war veterans and their families.