A Colony in a Nation
Chris Hayes
I
When was the last time you called the cops?
I’ll go first.
It was a few years ago. I heard a couple arguing loudly on the street outside my apartment. “Arguing” probably undersells it—he was screaming as he leaned over her, his voice punching her ears: “How stupid are you!?! What were you even thinking!?!” and so forth. The argument echoed through the dark in the leafy, affluent neighborhood I live in. Here we are unused to street noise of that particular type. I listened for a few minutes, and then some part of me thought, I know how this ends. So I dialed 911 and told the dispatcher what I was hearing. A few minutes later, from the dark of my apartment, I peeked out the window and saw the swirling blue light of a police cruiser. The car pulled over, and two cops approached the couple. I stopped watching and went to bed. Mission accomplished.
But whatever happened to that couple? To that woman?
I have no idea. I thought at that moment, and would still like to think, that I called the cops because I was trying to protect her from a conflict that was likely to end in violence. But maybe I just wanted peace and quiet restored to my peaceful and quiet neighborhood. As much as I told myself in that moment that I was calling the cops on her behalf, I have no idea if she would’ve wanted me to make that call, or if it made her life any better. For all I know, the encounter with the police only made him angrier, and she bore the brunt of that anger in their apartment, hours later.
Whatever became of her, one thing is clear to me in retrospect. At the moment I called the police, I could not have told you what law was being broken, what crime was being committed. I dialed that number not to enforce the law but to restore order.
There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there’s a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler’s head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.
I’ve really felt the latter only once, at the 2000 Republican National Convention. I was twenty-one years old. My then-girlfriend-now-wife’s father, Andy Shaw, a journalist, was covering the convention, and she and I decided to head to Philadelphia, both to see him and to take in the sights and sounds of thousands of Republicans assembling to nominate George W. Bush for president. After a train ride down from New York, we met Andy outside the convention center. Kate and I drew stares from convention delegates who were in country club attire, since we were dressed like the scruffy college students we were. People asked if we were protesters.
The three of us began to make our way through the multilayered security checkpoints. At the first one, as we put our bags through a metal detector, I suddenly remembered that I happened to have about thirty dollars worth of marijuana stuffed into my eyeglass case in a side pocket of my travel bag.
Luckily the bag went through the metal detector with no problems, and as I picked it back up, I smiled to myself in relief at my near miss. But then the security line continued, and we passed through another checkpoint, and another. We finally rounded a bend to find yet another group of Philadelphia cops, with another metal detector; worst of all, this group seemed to be rifling through every bag.
I felt a pulsing in my temples as I watched an officer open the main pocket of my bag and search. Then he opened the second pocket and finally the side pocket with my eyeglass case. He reached in and was about to put it back in when he stopped and gave it a shake, realizing there was something inside.
He opened it, and his head jerked back in surprise at what he’d just found. He quickly turned his back to me and called over two other cops, one on each side. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder, huddled, discussing.
My vision started to peel in at the corners, and I felt briefly possessed. I envisioned running; it seemed tantalizingly possible. Liberating. I could get away before they had any idea who I was or whose bag it was. Did I have anything identifying in there? I must’ve.
But then, my girlfriend and her father were standing right there, so flight probably wouldn’t work. With tremendous effort, I overrode the impulse. “I think the cops just found weed in my bag,” I whispered to Kate. And then in desperation, searching for someone to fix the situation, or at the very least to absolve me of this idiotic mistake, I walked over to my future father-in-law and blurted out, “Andy, I think the cops just found weed in my bag.”
The cops continued to confer ominously.
Andy was confused. “What? Why’d you bring weed?”
And at that very moment, before I could answer (and really, what could I have said?), the police officer who’d found the drugs put my bag on a table and looked at me, as if to say Go ahead and take it.
I figured as soon as I reached out and acknowledged the bag was mine, they’d slap the cuffs on. But when I went to grab the bag . . . nothing happened. I picked it up.
Kate, her dad, and I walked into the convention center together. Her father said, amusedly, “You probably shouldn’t do that tomorrow.”