My petty crime arrest (& nauseating white privilege)
I was 23 and the cops came to my apartment and arrested me. The egregious charge was bicycle offenses and speeding/driving without a license. They came to my apartment. This was Madison, Wisconsin and there was a warrant out for my arrest. I was a student at the U and I didn’t even have a car. I’d borrowed my roommate’s dumpy, old Buick to get groceries and driven maybe five miles over the speed limit in my rush to stock up on ramen. I didn’t have a license with me. I had one but hadn’t bothered to bring it. (Who needs a license when they drive — how bougie!?) I had bike offenses as well, meaning I didn’t steal bikes I rode mine though a couple of stop signs or something — yeah, Madison, Wisconsin in the ’80s.
So I got a letter in the mail stating there was a warrant out for my arrest. All I had to do was show up at the courthouse and pay the fines — for the car ticket as well as the bikes tickets — but I couldn’t be bothered and I wasn’t about to spend my kush money on that. I was now a fugitive. And I loved it.
“I can’t get busted for anything,” I’d say to people at parties, usually while smoking weed and staying adequately close to the keg. I went into a concert at the coliseum once with five cans of beer lined up in this flat, rectangular purse I had — red with gold flecks it in that matched my Wizard-of-Oz red shoes. At least the purse was flat without the five cans of beer in it.
“Any cans or bottles?” the security guy said to me.
“No,” I said — of course I was absolutely high.
“Open the bag,” he said. He pulled out one can after another.
I was taken out of the crowd and to a back room somewhere. A cop called me in and made sure everything was straight — and it was, because I told them I was my older sister. I gave them her name and date of birth and address. We lived together, with two other girls. And I got back into the concert. I argued with them that I’d paid for the ticket and now that I didn’t have the beer I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I might have even said they owed me for the cans of PBR.
“And I have a clean record,” I said. “You just checked me out.” I think I even added that it would be criminal to keep me from this band.
“I’m a fugitive,” I reminded my sister when I found her and told her what had happened.
She was appalled but relieved. I also scored huge points with her friends and I think she was even kind of proud of me. She’s only 13 months older than I.
So everything went without incident — unless you call that concert thing an incident — for quite a time. And then I was in my apartment one evening with the guy who was sort of my boyfriend, though I didn’t really like him that much and things between us had been going south in a pretty big way. My intercom rang and I thought it was the dude we were planning on buying a little kush from, so I buzzed him in without asking who it was. My boyfriend and I were in the midst of smoking a ju-ju.
I opened the door after the knock and a cop was standing there.
Holy shit. My boyfriend had a little cocaine on him as well (’80s — don’t judge). He did have the wherewithal to put out the joint in the background. I say this because he’d never been quite clever enough for me but at least this time he came through.
And then we both had the nerve give the cop an attitude and treat him with complete derision. He said I had to come with him. I had a warrant out for my arrest. He was totally polite.
“I have to brush my teeth first,” I said, and I did, while he stood there.
“It’s Friday night,” my boyfriend said petulantly, which to this day strikes me as one of the most idiotic comments on record — how dare the cops arrest college students on their main night out!
I locked my apartment door and walked down the three flights of stairs with my boyfriend and the cop, who wasn’t a whole lot older than we were. There was another cop outside and they never handcuffed me or anything but I had to put my hands up on the roof of the car while they patted me down. A couple of people had stopped to watch by now, making up a mini-crowd, along with my boyfriend.
I got in the back seat of the car. I was just slightly unnerved, but interested, and high — quite. At the station I had to have paperwork filled out, which was simple. I sat at a table. Then I was put in a holding cell. It was just I and this man, a black guy, around 40, who looked fairly bummed out. Okay, I’m in a holding cell, I said to myself. This is a pretty pass.
My entire life was an all-around mess at that point, so this was no more than the icing on the cake. It was fitting and almost a relief, practically restful.
It wasn’t too long before a cop came to get me — maybe an hour had passed. My boyfriend had apparently come and paid $90 bucks to get me out. He was waiting there with another guy we knew. We got to leave and that was all that really happened. Technically I was out on bail and I had to go pay my tickets and present my license the first chance I got, which I did — finally.
I thanked my boyfriend but I felt odd in front on him now, embarrassed, without quite knowing why. Maybe this whole thing made me feel that he had something up on me. Or maybe it was the way he seemed so pleased and almost smug as we went out that night. I went around telling everyone what had happened — adding to my repertoire as it were. And I heard him telling someone about how glad he was that they’d had put me up against the car and searched me.
“Great, humiliate Sandy more,” he told them he’d been thinking.
What the hell’s wrong with this guy, I thought? And then he broke up with me about a week later and started going out with Rita, a real earth-mother type. That took some nerve. I was the one who didn’t even like him that much.
Sure, I’d gotten arrested, big deal. My grades were in the toitie and other aspects of my life were similarly out of control. But I was sensitive and poetic and he didn’t even realize it. To prove it I put his guilt break-up flowers down the garbage disposal one at a time after he left — which almost broke it by the way. And that same night another friend put large screws through the cuffs of my denim jacket so they were sticking out (’80s). He drove me around to bars on the back of his mountain bike where I got triple wasted. And I never paid the guy back his $90 either.
My flagrant white privilege is on display in every aspect of this story. And I had zero realization at the time. I used to love kind of taunting cops whenever I had the chance, almost like sport. I thought sort of challenging their authority was doing something positive on a societal level — who did they think they were? Then one day I realized I was just a tedious brat absolutely steeped in white privilege. Like the white girlfriend in the beginning scenes of Jordan Peele’s phenomenally well-crafted movie Get Out: she mouths off to the white cop thinking she’s protecting her black boyfriend. All she does is shine a light on her white privilege and make him feel deeply uncomfortable. And for anyone who saw the movie you know how that turns out.
Well, I learned. That was years ago and I was young but god knows the last thing this world needs is an oblivious, obnoxious voice that’s going to add to the tension. I’ll still speak out to injustice whenever I get the chance but I’ll damn well check myself before I open my trap if I realize I’m doing it just because I can.
