I have lived in Chicago for over fifty years. During that time, my husband and I and our foster daughter (all of us white) have had between ten and twenty encounters with the Chicago Police Department. Three or four of them involved arrests. One of them involved a lawsuit against the police department, which was settled in favor of me and my fellow plaintiffs. None of them, fortunately, involved physical brutality. Which probably reflects a sort of baseline for white privilege. This year’s grim history of interactions between police and people of color, and my own advancing age, have made me conscious of my household’s history with the Chicago police, and also (now that I think of it) of the huge significance of the role of technology in civilian-police interactions in the last forty years.
My husband and I moved to Chicago from Boston in 1965. He was born and brought up in Boston; I was raised in South Florida, and moved to Boston for college. He worked in sales, which meant he spent a lot of time on the road. He was a careful driver, and expected that to keep him on the right side of the law. But in his first few months of driving in Chicago, he discovered this was not necessarily so. He was driving a new car with out-of-state plates, which apparently told the local police that he had more money than time, the equivalent of a target on his rear window. One day as he was driving down South Shore Drive, he was pulled over by two officers, who first told him he was exceeding the speed limit (which he knew was bogus), and then that he was “driving too fast for conditions” (a few raindrops on the road.) The cops debated between them what he could do to persuade them not to bring him in, and finally asked him what he had in his wallet. (This astonished my husband, who, from prior experience in Boston, expected a pair of officers to keep each other honest—not in Chicago, apparently.) What he had was a ten dollar bill. The cops did some more debating, over not wanting to leave him without lunch money. Finally, they took the ten--and gave him four dollars change (this was back when one could buy lunch for four dollars)!
Chicago, for those who do not know, is rigidly geographically segregated. The South and West Sides are mostly Black. The North Side is mostly white. (There is not much of an East Side—that’s mostly Lake Michigan.) We lived South, near the University of Chicago, where I was doing graduate work when we moved here. One evening, when we were driving home from visiting friends on the North Side, we got disoriented going through Lincoln Park, and were pulled over. The cop looked at my husband’s driver’s license, noticed the South Side address, and remarked, “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” I think now that he was remarking on something police are trained to notice—that we were out of place, white people with a South Side address, and people with a South Side address driving on the North Side. What I just managed to avoid blurting out to the police officer at the time, however, was that in 6th-grade civics they taught us that America was better than Russia because in Russia you had to have a passport to go from one city to another, but in a free country you could go wherever you wanted. Obviously this was a somewhat inaccurate picture of life in Russia, but it was still a valid point.
On another occasion, we got stuck in a park on the South Side, near our home, in the middle of a powerful rainstorm, in the middle of the night, and our car stalled out and would not restart. Those were the days before cell phones. All we could do was wait in the car until the rain stopped, and hope none of the vicious thugs who were reputed to infest that park didn’t attack us in the meantime. But we were passed by several police cars in the next hour or so. We honked our horn, flashed our lights, and hoped they would provide the service and protection their motto promised. None of them stopped. Eventually we got the car started. My husband, who was after all a former Boy Scout, drove immediately to the nearest police station to ask why none of Chicago’s finest had stopped to help us. “That park is dangerous,” he was told. “For all we knew, you would have attacked us if we’d stopped.” (And besides, I now suspect that the sergeant was probably thinking, “how did we know you were white?”) We somehow refrained from pointing out that, if the park really was that dangerous, we were in more danger from the hypothetical thugs than they were, being unarmed. I wasn’t quite sure, at that point, whom the police served, but it was quite clear whom they protected—themselves.
Gentle reader, you’re probably irritated, and bored, by this recital of First World problems in a world where people of color are risking their lives every time they get behind the wheel or walk down the street. I don’t blame you. This narrative does get a bit less boring, but it still just describes the relative failures of white privilege.
I’m no longer clear on chronology, but some time in the 1970s or 1980s, my husband had a cluster migraine attack, involving vomiting, on a subway platform downtown. Two police officers who were patrolling the subway accosted him and threatened to arrest him for “public drunkenness”, and shook him down for all the cash he had on him (a lot more than ten dollars, this time.) They did at least drive him home after that, so perhaps the only legal complaint he had was overcharging for a kind of cab ride. But having something like that happen in the middle of a cluster migraine attack (look it up) certainly borders on brutality.
Once, I was driving home (on the South Side) with our foster daughter and got pulled over (defective brake lights? Don’t remember for sure) by THREE police cars, and a total of FIVE officers, with guns drawn, in honor of TWO unarmed women. Spent a long time waiting for them to run my plates, eventually got my ticket and went home, somewhat incensed at the waste of the taxpayers’ money, but blissfully unaware of what the police were probably prepared to do to us if we had turned out to be male and non-white.
Many years later, I took part in a counter-demonstration on the Southwest Side (still somewhat white and anti-Black) against the local Nazis. The semi-official line between Black and white neighborhoods at the time was Western Avenue. My companions and I parked on the Black side, and walked toward the white side where the demonstration was happening. We were stopped by a couple of police officers asking for our ID to determine whether we lived on the white side (we didn’t.) Ultimately we were arrested, essentially for crossing Western Avenue without a passport. Shades of 6th-grade civics! That’s where the lawsuit comes in—the ACLU sued for violation of our First Amendment rights, and the case was settled in our favor, giving us each some very nice spending money. Sometimes the good guys win. To earn that money (and a very nice set of built-in bookcases in our living room), I spent an hour and a half in a squad wagon with a real honest-to-god psychotic Nazi, and four hours in the police lockup (which was actually the safest and most comfortable place I’d been all day.) Supposedly we had been arrested for our own protection. And—here’s where modern technology first comes in—I photographed our arrest and our ride to the lockup with my brand new miniature still camera, which for some reason the police never bothered confiscating. Which probably had a lot to do with the willingness of the Chicago Police Department to settle the case.
In a way, this whole narrative was created by my husband’s insistence, in 1965, on moving into what was at the time the only more-or-less non-segregated neighborhood in Chicago, and thereby giving our household a whole lot of experience of being “out-of-place” from the police point of view. (When we negotiated the rental of our first Chicago apartment over the phone from Boston, the prospective landlord had no qualms about asking us our racial background—I forget what words he used, but this was still before the federal and state laws which would have made the question illegal, and I was annoyed but not shocked at the question.) If more middle-class white people had had similar experiences, would it have mattered? Or was the real breaking point the invention of cheap portable video cameras, miniature still cameras, and then camera phones and video phones. Rodney King’s case, remember, got into court only because some local guy wanted to try out his new video camera. George Floyd’s vindication came about because Darnella Frazer recorded his murder on her phone. It has taken a while, but perhaps the movement toward police reform has happened mainly because communication technology has irreversibly created what urbanologist Jane Jacobs calls “eyes on the street.” The prosecution in the Chauvin trial kept telling the jurors to “believe what you see.” Which the jurors in the Rodney King trial twenty years earlier didn’t. So technology does bring progress, but it can take a while.