“We the people of the city of Chester, we want the truth this time.”

As a recent North Philadelphia transplant, I spent Saturday as part of my routine 1.5 times-a-month barbershop visit back home to Chester. It began with excitement and anxiety. A new father once-over was in search of our barber — a reliable barber known to go AWOL — to get his clean cut before returning home to his first-born daughter. “They just got released from Crozer at 2. I can’t leave her there with her mom for too long. She tryna rest. Bruh [the barber] gotta hurry up.” In the same token, who really wants to be woofin’ at such a beautiful time in one’s family life. You have the blessing of being able to hold (y)our future in your hands. So we laughed about it and waited to get right. Eventually, our barber would return. He’d get first-priority in the chair and by-and-by, we all would get fresh and get home.

This celebration of love and life was quickly interrupted by the flashing of sirens and the errant zooming of police cars down the block to what we only could assume to be another shooting. Details and rumors would trickle in alike: 
“They said they dumped like 1000 rounds.”
“They said it was ______, you remember ______?”
“They said it was the police who was shooting.”
“Who shot first? You know they be lying.”
“This is just like what happened last month.”
“Wow. You gotta see it. Its on the Facebook.”

News reports would later evidence that the first shot was fired from inside the car towards the police. This imminent threat to the life of a police officer is all that is required to justify an entire squadron to empty the entire clip of their service weapons. Makes sense. Yet, corruption is no stranger to the Chester Police Department. Or to the United States. So every State provided piece of evidence submitted to the People’s Court is given fine-tooth comb cross-examination. Even when deadly force seems justifiable, history — both personal and perceptive — teaches us to keep doubts as reasonable.

The question is back to the police,” said Pastor Calvin Williams. “Who was at fault? Are ya’ll gonna tell the truth? All we want is the truth. We the people of the city of Chester, we want the truth this time.”

This chasm, the river-wide distrust (in comparison to the more unassuming lack of trust) is felt on both sides of the divide. Both between Chester Police and Chester People. Both who just simply want to get back to those who love them. Both who believe that those on the other side do not want this for them. Both who understand the ghosts of “…this time” reminds us of the haunting of every other time. With this in mind, there’s no way for an aggrieved Black population to recognize the distinct separate occassion of when a young person targeted a police officer disconnected from the painful and unaccounted-for history of Chester police officers who have left fatal bullets in these same Black residents’ backs. District Attorney press conferences can’t erase the spirits of former beloved family members, classmates, and community members. For the police officer, I imagine that a similar mindset sets in. The psychological effects of engaging with potentially fatal violence cannot be contained by the badge. We are human. One would hope that would open a sense of mercy and grace for us all.

This history of deadly violence will most certainly not be forgotten when anyone, including a Black mayor, argues on behalf of broken windows policing: an invasive, aggressive community policing strategy that prioritizes the criminalization of signs of disorder. Everything that defines Chester is a sign of disorder. Read up on America’s sacrifice zones. See Chester-Upland School District and its fight to maintain quality public education in Chester. What such a strategy accomplishes is to bring that collective, continuing, and cumulative disorder further into the present of our minds. That we will be overpoliced and underprotected. That we will be treated as potential revenue sources. That to those sworn and paid to protect and serve us, individual lawlessness supercedes societal lovelessness. All it achieves is to remind us of the proverbs of James Baldwin in the landmark The Fire Next Time:

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law — in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.

When Pastor Williams asks “Are y’all gonna tell the truth?”, there’s the logical response that what he means is a simple collection of evidence meant to prove a justifiable murder by agents of the State. However, I hear in his call-to-action a hint of something deeper — a demand to reckon with our illusion-filled, painfully-complicated history within our small multiverse of a city. It is one that is aimed toward the police department, but wide enough to be inclusive of non-State-actor violence. This too has been shaped by the State in its truthful dimensions. Chester was polluted with the social poisons of strucural racism and exploitative economic subjugation long before increased chemical pollution served to escalate the blood loss. This has concrete effects on our children. What brought us here? Can the people adorned and emboldened with State power account for this? In that avalanche, every snowflake pleads not guilty.

At the intersections of race and gender, the welfare and dignity of black women and Latinas are undermined by the national failure to enforce fair housing and fair employment laws, by the concentration of poverty in neighborhoods inhabited largely by blacks and Latinos, by the criminalization of poverty, by the proliferation of punishments inside the criminal justice system, and by the expansion of the collateral consequences of arrests and criminal convictions in society at large. Produced by a plethora of public policies and private actions, these injuries entail more than denials of rights and resources to individuals. They evidence the existence and extent of a concentrated political attack on communities of color. (Lipsitz, 2012)

Returning to our future, Mindy Fullilove writes critically, yet optimistically, to the restoration of long-suffering communities:

“Hysteresis,” Rod said when I called to complain to him one day. “It’s a principle of physics that teaches us that the past conditions the future. It is hard work to overcome the past destruction of communities. This applies to human communities, like neighborhoods, in the same manner that it applies to ponds. It is a process that requires that you both stop the source of the injury, for example, the run-off of pollution to the pond, and reanimate the life of the community. The upward spiral of recovery is shaped by the downward spiral of destruction.”

That upward spiral of recovery that we must embrace, accented by the love of a father for his newborn daughter and reciprocity for that of his partner, requires that we must take this death-dealing chasm into account. That we must reach for the source of the injury to find out what lies there. All we want is the truth. We continue to wait, wounded and unkempt, to get right.