In 2011, before I learned how to drive a truck, I drove a cab in Kingston, NY. If I could’ve found a way to make another couple hundred a week, I might’ve qualified as impoverished. I was one step below that. But I was also in a period of rebuilding and starting from scratch and it was the experience of being in that situation that helped me to stay so grateful for how things eventually turned out.
I mention this because at one point the Kingston police wanted to get a handle on the crime records of all cab drivers in the area. It seems some local young woman was put in an uncomfortable and precarious situation with a driver and it was discovered, after the fact, that the driver had a sexual assault and misconduct history that went back to the early eighties.
The company fired the driver, settled out of court and mentioned to the police that they were unaware of his background. With the extraordinary amount of turnover in conjunction with the frugality (or, if you like, greed) of these business owners, paying for background checks was out of the question.
This survey, which I’m sure was at the very least, legally questionable, seemed like a viable remedy.
When it was my turn to be questioned, which was done quite informally by the manager, I answered honestly that I had never been arrested. She smiled and asked me to please take her seriously. This was followed by the cautionary tale I relayed to you in the second paragraph about the pervert driver.
“How many arrests have you had?” she repeated.
“Maria, (not her real name) why don’t you ask Officer Hogwash to run my name?”
“You’ve never been arrested?” she asked again, as if I was telling her I was still a virgin at 41 years old.
“I have NEVER been arrested.”
“Weird,” she mumbled.
It was weird, too. And it wasn’t because I never broke any laws, either. As a matter fact, to speak in the hypothetical, if I had been arrested and convicted for every law I ever broke, I’m pretty sure I could easily be spending the finality of my time on the planet in a correctional facility.
No violent crimes, of course. Just driving with, initially, an ounce of coke in the car every week for nearly a year. After that, it became a quarter pound every Wednesday, I started taking public transportation and meeting my guy at the supermarket. I would shove the very protective bag into a box of Nilla Wafers because there was just enough room and, when I got on the bus, I’d take the little Elmer’s out of my pocket and reseal the box. I’d wear a starched shirt and a hand-painted tie and my hygiene was always on point.
A little mixing and chopping and a couple of phone calls later, I had what I needed to pay my bills, stay awake for a week and continue going to the studio to record my album the way I always wanted to. (BTW, this album can still be heard on Spotify. It’s called “Burst”)
I had a dude who was in a side project with Marky Ramone produce and play solos on a couple tracks. I was able to get Erica Quitzow to play violin and Don Grossinger, who mastered REM’s Green and some stuff for Bruce and Paul McCartney, to master every song.
There may have been a “War on Drugs” but I was a double agent.
I’d see police, read their badge and ask lightheartedly, “How’s Officer Gonzalez today?”
So, let’s take a second and think about the war on drugs.” For all those who are not aware, the war on drugs continues to possess a lot of parallels that the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident had . If you saw Rock’s Netflix special (and I’m sorry Roxane Gay–I love you to pieces but I don’t agree with your assessment of it at all) you’ll remember that Chris Rock said that Will Smith was practicing “selective outrage.” In other words, Smith was hurt terribly by his wife and decided he’d hit Rock because he was a much more convenient target. (Or so he thought at the time.)
Customs officials have said, off the record, that when they see tractor trailer loads of cocaine come racing over the Texas border, the most they’ll do is smile and wave. Why is this? Because the cost of interfering with this kind of guerilla commerce would be getting chopped down with machine gun fire when they least expect it. And that’s just for the lucky ones.
If you really get in the way of the more powerful cartels, you can expect a violent home invasion where you get to watch your children and spouse tortured right before experiencing a similar fate..
So when you hear about customs agents taking bribes to allow certain nefarious activities to go unchecked, you should understand that the financial rewards are just one half of the issue. There are countless stories of very honorable men and women in these positions whose only reward for their nobility is an invitation to trade in their guns and nightsticks for harps and wings.
Better to just take the dough and shut up.
The people who do suffer in the war on drugs are generally the clueless masses. Or, if you like, people very much like the driving staff at the taxi stand in Kingston. Most of the time, they make it too easy for the garden variety town cop to score felony arrests, great headlines and promotions because they’re…well, they’re clueless.
As much as the progressive contingent of society bemoan police profiling, it will never go away. The reason is simpler than you might imagine: first off, it works like a charm. Cops know that when they roll up on a domestic and the dude is dressed a certain way in a particular part of town, it’s not going to be too much of a stretch to assume that they’re going to find something illegal in his pockets, under the bed or behind the couch. The second reason it will never stop is because it can never be proven. Local law enforcement will never–I repeat NEVER–commit any of these practices to paper. It’s a verbal mandate and every cop knows about it.
As a person who spent a lot of time bringing 12 step meetings into the county jail, I can assure you, once the first arrest is made on these people, it never stops. They will spend the rest of their lives on the “electronic plantation.” Why do I refer to it as that?
Felony convictions make it nearly impossible to find anything beyond sub-standard employment. And the small income most of these people earn pay the salaries of judges, probation officers, correction officers and the like, in the form of fines, lawyer fees, bail and the twenty or so other creative ways local law enforcement has developed to nickel and dime the remedial set.
I use the word “remedial” because one need not be a social worker to understand that most of these tortured people are not evil. They’re in and out of jail because they never learned to plan strategically, tell time, become intimate with calendars or keep a lid on their temper.
Once a person has been booked and processed, 99% of the time, they will go right on violating probation and getting tossed into the clink. From there, they will stop earning income, get behind on their child support, stop paying car insurance and car loans, lose whatever little they’ve managed to accrue in life and, as a result, wind up violating again and again. From early adulthood to their premature deaths–usually from ailments that stable people take prescriptions for and never have to be concerned about.
So here’s the moral of my story: I discovered a sure fire path to staying out of jail. And even though a decent case has been made that it was only due to my “white privilege,” I’ve always felt like that was never entirely accurate. I won’t argue against the idea that there are alot of racist cops in the world, but like I said, I volunteered in jails enough to notice that there were an awful lot of white dudes in there, too.
These were white dudes that, for some inexplicable reason, haven’t been able to figure out that if one is going to engage in drug dealing, drug taking, soliciting prostitutes and/or robbing houses, it’s a great idea not to speed, not to hit women, not to smoke blunts in your car, not to talk disrespectfully to cops, not to run from cops, not to graffiti the outside walls of the supermarket, not to punch a police officer or engage in all the other stupid shit that screams “Hey! Look at me! I have a vial of crack in my pocket!”.
Those were the magic ingredients that kept me out of a jail cell long enough to grow up and stop doing dumb shit.
Well, to clarify, I still do my share of dumb shit, but not the kind that will threaten my liberty or my family.
This is not nuclear physics. In fact, it might be considered common sense if it wasn’t so f*cking uncommon.
Common or not, nearly all people have the power to stay out of prison. Only certain people practice these methods.
If you have a loved one, just coming of age, you may want to impart this wisdom. I realize that somehow, and I have my own personal theories about this, getting arrested has become not just normalized but “cool” among certain social groups. A rite of passage almost.
Unfortunately, the passage only leads to poverty, misery, indentured servitude and more bologna sandwiches than anyone should ever eat in a lifetime.