Out of morbid curiosity, I went into the first bathroom inside the arena, fished out my glasses case, and flipped it open. Sure enough, the weed was still there.
This story is one of my better ones. “The time I almost got caught with drugs at the Republican National Convention” is fun to tell because, ultimately, nothing bad came out of it. And with the advantage of hindsight, I can look back and know that even if I had been arrested, it would’ve been no more than an embarrassing hassle. I’m a straight white guy. I was a college student. I had access to lawyers and resources and, through all that, a very good chance of convincing someone that the world would keep spinning on its axis if I pleaded to a misdemeanor and got a little probation, and we all just pretended it hadn’t happened.
Luckily for me, that harrowing encounter is the closest I’ve come to the criminal justice system. But over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the ground reporting both on criminal justice and on the growing social movement to change how it operates. And in hundreds of conversations with people in Baltimore, Charleston, Chicago, New York, Ferguson, Dallas, and elsewhere, I’ve had occasion to think about the enormous distance between their experience of the law and my own.
On a warm October day on the Westside of Baltimore, I stood interviewing Dayvon Love in the parking lot of a public school where he once coached debate. I was there to talk about policing and crime and the trauma of lives lived dodging both with no cover.
Earlier that year, in April, a young man named Freddie Gray had died in police custody. His death triggered public mourning, calls for official resignations, protests, and unrest. The city was now bracing for the trials of the officers who had been indicted for causing Gray’s death. (None of them would be convicted. Midway through a succession of trials, after a hung jury and a mistrial for one officer and three acquittals, the prosecutor would throw in the towel and drop the rest of the charges.)
Love was a good person to have that conversation with. He speaks with an uncanny and particular cadence that comes from a life steeped in competitive debate. Born poor on the Westside, he discovered debate as a teenager through a program in his school and got hooked. “My initial motivation was that I needed to get into college for free,” he says when I ask what led him to debate. “So I just thought, ‘I am going to get really good at this so I can go to college for free,’ and that’s what happened. But along the way I was able to meet people who helped me think about debate as a broader tool for social justice.”
Today Love coaches high school debate on the Westside and works as a political activist. His 2008 debating team, composed entirely of black students from one of Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods, won the national championship. Run-ins with police were simply part of life in his neighborhood, Love told me, and no amount of bookishness or respectability was a shield.
One night his life almost changed. “I was seventeen years old, it was the day of a debate tournament. I’d won first place, and that night I was catching a bus to go to New York to see a friend.” He had met the New York friend through Model UN just a few weeks earlier. On his way to the bus station in the wee hours of the morning, Love and his father were pulled over by police. “They say I match the description of someone who stole a woman’s purse.”
The police began to search the car. More cruisers pulled up with their lights flashing. They took Love out of the car and had him stand in the middle of the street. At one point, one shined his police light right into the teenager’s face “And you heard them ask the woman, you know, ‘Is this him’? And she says, ‘I don’t know.’ And so luckily I had the presence of mind to think, ‘We had just stopped at the ATM to get the money I needed for my ticket.’ So I explained to them, I said I had just got the money that I needed to pay for my ticket.” Love happened to have the receipt from the ATM; the time stamp corroborated his story. “And luckily they let me get away, but that easily could have went in an entirely different way.”
By “entirely different way,” Love meant being swept into the vortex of a penal system that captures more than half the black men his age in his neighborhood. By “entirely different way,” he meant an adulthood marked by prison, probation, and dismal job prospects rather than debate coaching and activism. If he hadn’t been so quick on his feet, if the woman hadn’t been unsure the police had the right person, everything might have been different.
Fair to say that Dayvon and I, in our ways, both dodged a bullet, but the similarities ended there. I actually did something wrong: I was carrying an illegal drug. I wasn’t quick enough on my feet to defuse the situation, and even if I had been arrested and booked, it all almost certainly would have worked out fine in the end. The stakes felt very high, but they were actually pretty low.
Dayvon, on the other hand, had done nothing wrong. Unlike me, he was quick enough on his feet to successfully defuse the situation. And while for me the stakes were in reality rather low, for him they weren’t. Everything really could have changed in that moment for the worse. Out of those two brushes with the law, we both ended up with the same outcome: a clean record and a sigh of relief. But it took vastly different degrees of effort and ingenuity to get there.