My Neighbor the Cop, A Pretty Blonde Lady, and a Beloved Black Man

Life in Minneapolis has got me thinking

There’s this book by Timothy Synder, On Tyranny, warning Americans how close we are to authoritarianism. One of the many recommendations to prevent this is to get out and meet your neighbors. My husband took this to heart and invited over a neighbor we haven’t talked to in three years.

He’s a police officer in the Twin Cities area.

My husband and I watched the dashcam footage from the day Philando Castile was killed only days earlier. We were already livid about this case from the day Ms. Reynolds somehow kept it together to record the aftermath of his death.

Our neighbor made the mistake of bringing up the case. My husband had been drinking, and lost it. It wasn’t a productive discussion. Our neighbor expected us to see how an officer might feel threatened, and my husband [loudly] wanted him to see how race clouded perception of threat. Our neighbor told us about how they taught him in training that at any moment someone could be pulling a weapon from their pocket instead of a wallet. The volume of the conversation was not working out.

But I pulled him aside myself to tell him something that has bothered me for a long time. I said,

“Listen, Eric, when I was a social worker with people in residential housing with serious mental illness, we were also at physical risk from our clients. When I was a probation officer, I was also at physical risk from my clients. I never carried a weapon, and no one expected me to. I was expected to have to respond to violence with deescalation.”

Only a short time later, a few miles down the road, our Twin Cities community is dealing with another police shooting. There is race involved again. I immediately placed bets with my police officer neighbor that this time the black, Muslim officer would be convicted.

But aside from that, I also implored him to consider — and I implore all police to consider — maybe, just maybe you all are trigger-happy because you are over-training for the weapon in the pocket. For the noise in the night to be threat of death. And yes, race is affecting your judgment about what is threatening.