When the Police Knock Your Door In
To round up enough young men to meet their informal quotas and satisfy their superiors, the police wait outside hospitals serving poor Black communities and run the IDs of the men walking inside. They stop young men sitting on the stoop and search their pockets for drugs. But the police also deploy a less direct strategy to make their stats: they turn to girlfriends, mothers, and relatives to provide information about these young men’s whereabouts and activities.
The reliance on intimates as informants is not the dirty dealing of a few rogue cops or the purview of a few specialized officers. Police don’t reserve this treatment for the families of those few men who make their most wanted list. In our 2007 household survey of the 6th Street neighborhood, 139 of 146 women reported that in the past three years, a partner, neighbor, or close male relative was either wanted by the police, serving a probation or parole sentence, going through a trial, living in a halfway house, or on house arrest. Of the women we interviewed, 67 percent said that during that same period, the police had pressured them to provide information about that person.
As the police lean on women to help round up their partners, brothers, and sons, women face a crisis in their relationship and their self-image. Most help the police locate and convict the young men in their lives, and so must find a way to cope publicly and privately with their betrayals. A rare few manage to resist police pressure outright, garnering significant local acclaim. A greater number work to rebuild themselves and their relationships after they have informed, which is sometimes successful and sometimes not. These cases are considered at the end.
The journey from intimate to informant (or, in rarer cases, from intimate to resister) often begins when a woman discovers that the man in her life has become wanted by the police, or has become more legally precarious than he had been.1
On an unusually warm Sunday afternoon in March, Aisha and I sat on the wide cement steps of her four-story subsidized apartment building. Her boyfriend, Tommy, leaned on the railing beside her, chatting with a neighbor who had stopped on his way home. Aisha’s aunt and neighbor sat farther up the steps, waiting for their clothes to finish at the Laundromat across the street. We passed around a bag of jalapeño sunflower seeds and kept our eye out for Aisha’s cousin, who was supposed to be coming back with a six-pack from the corner store. Time dragged on, and Tommy remarked that she’d probably taken our pooled money and gone to the bar.
As we sat watching the kids play and spitting the shells into little piles beside us, Tommy unfolded a notice he had received that day from family court, a notice that he must appear before a judge because the mother of his two-year-old son was asking for back payments in child support. If he came to court empty handed, he told us, the judge might take him into custody on the spot. If he didn’t show up, a warrant might be issued for his arrest for contempt.
“She just mad you don’t mess with her no more,” Aisha said. “She knows you pay for all his clothes, all his sneaks. Everybody knows you take care of your son.”
“When is the court date?” I asked.
“Next month,” Tommy answered, without looking up.
“Are you going to go?”
“He don’t have six hundred dollars!” Aisha cried.
We tried to calculate how many days in jail it would take to work off this amount, but we couldn’t remember if they subtract five dollars or ten dollars for each day served. Aisha’s aunt said she thought it was less than that. Aisha concluded that Tommy would lose his job at the hospital whether he spent two weeks or two years in jail, so the exact amount he would work off per day was of little consequence.
Tommy looked at Aisha somberly and said, “If I run, is you riding?”
A neighbor’s five-year-old son started to cry, claiming that an older boy had pushed him. Aisha yelled at him to get back onto the sidewalk.
“If they come for me, you better not tell them where I’m at,” Tommy said quietly.
“I’m not talking to no cops!”
“They probably don’t even have your address. They definitely coming to my mom’s, though, and my baby-mom’s. But if they do come, don’t tell them nothing.”
“Shoot,” Aisha said. “Let them come. I’ll sic Bo right on them.”
“Yeah?” Tommy grinned appreciatively and nudged Aisha with his shoulder.
Aisha’s aunt turned and eyed her skeptically, shaking her head.
“I’m not letting them take him,” Aisha fired back. “For what? So he can just sit in jail for four months and lose his job? And don’t see his son?”
Aisha and Tommy began dating shortly after I first met her, when she was a high school freshman. What she liked about him then was that he was gorgeous, for one, and dark skinned, even darker than she was. Tommy, she said later, was not only her first; he was also her first love. They kept in touch for years afterward, though Tommy had a child with another woman, and Aisha began seriously seeing someone else. When Aisha turned twenty-one, this second man was sentenced to fifteen years in a federal penitentiary in Ohio. About six months later, Aisha and Tommy got back together. Soon after that, Tommy began working as a custodian at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. When he got the call for the job, they cried and hugged in the living room. Aisha had never dated a guy with a real job before, and became the only woman in her extended family with this distinction.
. . .
“If they lock me up, you going to come see me?” Tommy asked her.
“Yeah, I’ma come see you. I’ma be up there every week.”
“I know that’s right,” Aisha’s neighbor said. “Them guards up there going to know your name. They going to be like, ‘You always coming up here, Aisha!’”2
Later that evening, two of Aisha’s girlfriends came by. She told them about her conversation with Tommy: “He talking about, ‘if I run, is you riding?’ Shoot, they ain’t taking him! They’re going to have to kill me first.”
For Aisha, the news that Tommy may be taken came as a crushing personal blow. But it was also an opportunity to express her devotion, meditate on their relationship, and contemplate the lengths she would go in the future to hold it together.
Other women considered their family member’s pending imprisonment in more political terms. Mike’s mother, Miss Regina, was in her late thirties when we met. A reserved and proper person, she had made good grades in high school and got accepted to a local college. She became pregnant with Mike that summer. The way she told it, Mike’s father was the first person she had ever slept with, and she hoped they would get married. But the man became a heavy crack user, and was in and out of jail during Mike’s early years. By the time Mike was ten, Miss Regina told his father to stop coming around.3
By all accounts, Miss Regina worked two and sometimes three jobs while Mike was growing up, and she raised him with little help from her own parents. Mike got into a lot of trouble during his high school years, but managed to get his diploma by taking night classes.
By the time Mike came of age, the drama with the mother of his two children and his frequent brushes with the authorities had caused Miss Regina “a lifetime of grief.” By twenty-two, Mike had been in and out of county jail and state prison, mostly on drug charges.
When we met, Miss Regina was working for the Salvation Army as a caretaker to four elderly men and women whose homes she visited for twelve- or eighteen-hour shifts three times a week. She had moved to Northeast Philadelphia a few months before we met, noting that the 6th Street neighborhood had become too dangerous and dilapidated. The house she was renting was spotless; she even had a special machine to clear away the smoke from her cigarettes.
Miss Regina had just gotten home from work, and had started a load of laundry in the basement. Her mother and I were watching the soap opera Guiding Light on the plush loveseat in the living room when the phone rang. From the kitchen Miss Regina yelled, “I don’t believe this.” She passed me the phone; it was Mike, who told me his PO (probation officer) had issued him a warrant for breaking curfew at the halfway house last night. He had come home from prison less than a month ago; this violation would send him back for the remainder of his sentence, pending the judge’s decision. When we hung up, Miss Regina lit a cigarette and paced around the living room, wiping down the surfaces of the banister and TV stand with a damp rag.
“He’s going to spend two years in prison for breaking curfew? I’m not going to let them. They are taking all our sons, Alice. Our young men. And it’s getting younger and younger.”
Miss Regina’s mother, a quiet, churchgoing woman in her sixties, nodded and mumbled that it is indeed unfair to send a man to prison for coming home late to a halfway house. Miss Regina continued to pace, now spraying cleaning solvent on the glass table.
Let me ask you something, Alice. When you go up the F [local slang for the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), the county jail], why do you see nothing but Black men in jumpsuits sitting there in the visiting room? When you go to the halfway house, why is it nothing but Black faces staring out the glass? They are taking our children, Alice. I am a law-abiding woman; my uncle was a cop. They can’t do that.
On seventy-one occasions between 2002 and 2010, I witnessed a woman discovering that a partner or family member had become wanted by the police. Sometimes this notice came in the form of a battering ram knocking her door in at three in the morning. But oftentimes there was a gap between the identification of a man as wanted and the police’s attempts to apprehend him. Before the authorities came knocking, a letter would arrive from the courts explaining that a woman’s fiancé had either missed too many payments on his court fees or failed to appear in court, and that a bench warrant was out for his arrest. Or a woman would phone her son’s PO and learn that he did indeed miss his piss test again, or failed to return to the halfway house in time for curfew, and an arrest warrant would likely be issued, pending the judge’s decision. At other times, women would find out that the man in their lives was wanted because the police had tried and failed to apprehend him at another location.
In fifty-eight of the seventy-one times I watched women receive this news, they reacted with promises to shield their loved one from arrest. In local language, this is called riding.
Broadly defined, to ride is to protect or avenge oneself or someone dear against assaults to person or property. In this context, to ride means to shield a loved one from the police, and to support him through his trial and confinement if one fails in the first goal of keeping him free.4
It may come as a surprise that the majority of women I met who learned that a spouse or family member was wanted by the police initially expressed anger at the authorities, not the man, and promised to support him and protect him while he was hunted. In part, I think these women understood how easy it was to get a warrant when you are a Black young man in neighborhoods like 6th Street; they understood that warrants are issued not only for serious crimes but for technical violations of probation or parole, for failure to pay steep court fines and fees, or for failure to appear for one of the many court dates a man may have in a given month.5 A second and related reason for women’s anger is that the police have lost considerable legitimacy in the community: they are seen searching, questioning, beating, and rounding up young men all over the neighborhood. As Miss Regina often put it, the police are “an occupying force.” A third reason is more basic: no matter what a woman’s opinion of the police or of the man’s actions, she loves him, and does not want to part with him or see him subjected to what has been referred to as the pains of imprisonment.6
Riding is easy to do in the abstract. If the authorities never come looking, a woman can believe that she will hold up under police pressure and do her utmost to hide the man and protect him. So long as the threats of police pressure and prison are real but unrealized, a woman can believe in the most idealized version of herself. The man, too, can believe in this ideal version of her and of their relationship.
A few days after Tommy received the notice from family court, he went to the police station and turned himself in. The police never came to question Aisha. They did come for Miss Regina’s son, Mike.
I’d spent the night at Miss Regina’s house watching Gangs of New York with Mike and Chuck for maybe the hundredth time. I had fallen asleep on the living room couch and so heard the banging in my dream, mixed in with the title page music, which the DVD played over and over.
The door busting open brought me fully awake. I pushed myself into the couch to get away from it, thinking it might hit me on the way down if it broke all the way off its hinges. Two officers came through the door, both of them white, in SWAT gear, with guns strapped to the sides of their legs. The first officer in pointed a gun at me and asked who was in the house; he continued to point the gun toward me as he went up the stairs. I wondered if Mike and Chuck were in the house somewhere, and hoped they had gone.
The second officer in pulled me out of the cushions and, gripping my wrists, brought me up off the couch and onto the floor, so that my shoulders and spine hit first and my legs came down after. He quickly turned me over, and my face hit the floor. I couldn’t brace myself, because he was still holding one of my wrists, now pinned behind me. I wondered if he’d broken my nose or cheek. (Can you break a cheek?) His boot pressed into my back, right at the spot where it had hit the floor, and I cried for him to stop. He put my wrists in plastic cuffs behind my back; I knew this because metal ones feel cold. My shoulder throbbed, and the handcuffs pinched. I tried to wriggle my arms, and the cop moved his boot down to cover my hands, crushing my fingers together. I yelled, but it came out quiet and raspy, like I had given up. My hipbones began to ache—his weight was pushing them into the thin carpet.
A third cop, taller and skinnier, blond hair cut close to his head, entered the house and walked into the kitchen. I could hear china breaking, and watched him pull the fridge away from the wall. Then he came into the living room and pulled a small knife from its sheath on his lower leg. He cut the fabric off the couch, revealing the foam inside. Then he moved to the closet and pulled board games and photo albums and old shoes out onto the floor. He climbed on top of the TV stand and pushed the squares of the drop ceiling out, letting them hit the floor one on top of the other.
I could hear banging and clattering from upstairs, and then Miss Regina screaming at the cop not to shoot her, pleading with him to let her get dressed. All the while, the cop with his foot on me yelled for me to say where Mike was hiding. It would be my fault when Miss Regina’s house got destroyed, he said. “And I can tell she takes pride in her house.”
TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION
If the police decide to go after a man, chances are they will ask his relatives and partner where he is. Because these intimates are immersed in the lives of their legally precarious family members and partners, they tend to have considerable knowledge about their activities and routines. They know where a young man shops and sleeps, where he keeps his possessions, and with whom he is connected.
These days it isn’t difficult, expensive, or time consuming for the police to identify family members who may have information about the whereabouts or incriminating activities of a man they are after. Nor does it require direct knowledge of the neighborhood or its inhabitants gained through close association. Rather, information about a man’s relatives, children, partner, and relationship history can now be easily retrieved with a few keystrokes.
When the police arrest and process a man, they ask him to provide a good deal of information about his friends and relatives—where they live and where he lives, what names they go by, how to reach them. The more information he provides, the lower his bail will be, so he has a significant incentive to do this. By the time a man has been arrested a number of times, the police have substantial information about where his girlfriend works, where his mother lives, where his child goes to school.
Once a man has become wanted, the police visit his mother or girlfriend, and try to persuade her to give him up. In the words of one former Warrant Unit officer, “We might be able to track people with their cell phones or see every guy with a warrant in the neighborhood up on the computer screen, but when it comes down to it, you always go through the girlfriend, the grandmother, because she knows where he is, and she knows what he’s done.”7
After the police locate a family member or partner, they employ a series of techniques to gain the woman’s cooperation. These begin when the police are searching for a man or arresting him, but may continue through his trial and sentencing as they attempt to gather information that will facilitate a conviction.8
The most direct pressure the police apply to women to get them to talk is physical force: the destruction of their property and, in some cases, bodily injury. From what I have seen around 6th Street and nearby neighborhoods, police violence toward women occurs most frequently during raids. During these raids and also during interrogations, they deploy a number of less physical tactics to get uncooperative women to talk. The major three are threats of arrest, eviction, and loss of child custody.
Threats of Arrest
During raids and interrogations, the police threaten to arrest women for an array of crimes. First, they explain to a woman that her efforts to protect the man in her life constitute crimes in their own right. When Chuck’s mother, Miss Linda, blocked the police’s entrance to her home and waved an officer away as he pulled up her carpet and opened up her ceiling, the officers explained that they could charge her with assault on an officer, aiding and abetting a fugitive, and interfering with an arrest. They also told her that she would face charges for the gun they found in her house, since she didn’t have a permit for it. (In fact, in Philadelphia a permit is required only for carrying.) When Aisha’s neighbor said she would refuse to testify against her son, officers told her that she would go to jail for contempt. Once she agreed to cooperate, they informed her that if she changed her statement she would be jailed for lying under oath.
Beyond her efforts to protect the man in question, the police make it clear to a woman that many of her routine practices and everyday behaviors are grounds for arrest. Over the course of raids and interrogations, the officers make women realize that their daily lives are full of crimes, crimes the police are well aware of, and crimes that carry high punishments, should the authorities feel inclined to pursue them. When the police came for Mike’s cousin, they told his aunt that the property taxes she hadn’t paid and some long-overdue traffic fines constituted tax evasion and contempt of court. The electricity that she was getting from her neighbor two doors down, via three joined extension cords trailed through the back alley (because her own electricity had long been cut off, and for the use of which she was babysitting her neighbor’s two children three times a week), constituted theft, a public hazard, and a violation of city code.
The police also explain to a woman that she can be charged for the man’s crimes. Mike’s girlfriend told me she was sure she would be charged for possessing the gun or the drugs if she didn’t give Mike up, since the police found them in her house and car. The police also threatened to bring her up on conspiracy charges, claiming that they had placed a tap on her cell phone and so had proof that she was aware of Mike’s activities.
Police raids also place a woman’s other male relatives in jeopardy. When Mike had a warrant out for his arrest and the police were showing up at his mother’s house, she became very worried that her fiancé, who was driving without a license and who was also selling small quantities of marijuana as a supplement to his job at the hospital, would come under scrutiny. Because it is very likely that the other men in a woman’s life are also facing some violation or pending legal action (or engaged in the drug trade or other illegal work), the police’s pursuit of one man represents a fairly direct threat to the other men a woman holds dear.
Finally, the police tell a woman that if her present and past behavior is insufficient grounds for arrest, they will use every technology at their disposal to monitor her future activities. Any new crimes she commits will be quickly identified and prosecuted, along with any future crimes committed by her nearest and dearest. If she drives after she has been drinking, if she smokes marijuana, if her son steals candy from the store—they will know, and she or he will go to jail.
The threat of arrest and imprisonment is a powerful technique of persuasion, and perhaps more so when deployed on women. Fewer women than men go to prison or jail, making it a scarier prospect. Women don’t receive the same degree of familial support available to men, as visiting people in prison is considered women’s work, done for men by their female partners and kin, and men are less able to visit.9 In the 6th Street neighborhood, people tend to regard imprisonment as more of an indictment of a woman’s character and lifestyle than a man’s, partly on the grounds that police routinely stop and search men, while women must do something more extreme to get the police’s attention.
Threats of Eviction
In addition to threats of arrest and imprisonment, the police threaten to evict women who do not cooperate.10 They told my next-door neighbor that if she didn’t give up her nephew, they would call Licensing and Inspection and get her dilapidated house condemned. And when the police came to Steve’s grandmother’s house looking for him, they noted that the electricity and gas weren’t on, the water wasn’t running, and the bathtub was being used as an outhouse. These violations of the municipal health and building codes would easily constitute grounds for the city to repossess her property. The officers also informed her that the infestation of roaches, mice, and fleas in the house were sufficient grounds for the landlord to revoke her lease. Further, since she had placed the bail for Steve in her name, his running meant that the city could go after her for the entire bail amount—not just the 10 percent she put up, which meant the city could also take her car and her future earnings. When the police came to Aisha’s neighbor’s house looking for the neighbor’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, they informed her that if she didn’t give him up, they would come back late at night in a full raid. Since her apartment was subsidized, she could be immediately evicted for harboring a fugitive and putting her neighbors at risk. She would lose her present accommodations and all rights to obtain subsidized housing in the future.
Child Custody Threats
Another tactic that the police use to persuade women to talk is to threaten to take away their children. When the police raided Mike’s neighbor’s house, they told his wife that if she didn’t explain where to find him, they’d call Child Protective Services and report that the windows were taped up with trash bags, that the heat had been cut off and the open stove was being used as a furnace, and that her children were sleeping on the sofa. Officers also found marijuana and a crack pipe in the house. If she continued to be uncooperative, this evidence would build a powerful case for child neglect and unfit living conditions. That evening, the woman packed up her three children and drove them to Delaware to stay with an aunt until the police activity died down.
Most of the threats police make to women over the course of a raid, a stop, or an interrogation are never realized. Consequently, when a woman attempting to protect a man from the authorities does get arrested or evicted, or loses custody of her children, the news spreads quickly. Anthony had a cousin who lived in Virginia; she was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiracy to sell drugs and possession of an illegal firearm after she refused to serve as a witness for the case against the father of her child. With both her parents in prison, the four-year-old daughter was sent to Philadelphia, where she was passed from relative to relative. Two of Miss Linda’s neighbors got evicted from their government-subsidized housing for harboring a fugitive and interfering with an arrest when the police entered their home searching for a man who had robbed a bank. Families around 6th Street often recalled such stories when they anticipated a raid, or after some interaction with the police.
Presenting Disparaging Evidence
In order to get her to provide information, the police may injure a woman or destroy her property. If she persists in protecting the man, they threaten to arrest her, to publicly denounce her, to confiscate and appropriate her possessions, to evict her, or to take her children away. We might call violence and threats external forces of attack, as they operate from the outside to weaken the bonds between the woman and the man the police are after.
The authorities also work within the relationship, by presenting the woman with information about the man that shatters her high opinion of him and destroys the positive image she has of their relationship. We might call this an internal attack, as it works to break the bonds between men and women from the inside.
The police’s presentation of disparaging evidence operates as a complex, two-way maneuver. First, they demonstrate to the woman that the man she is trying to protect has cheated on her. They show her his cell phone records, text messages, and statements from women in the neighborhood. The improvement of tracking technologies means that no large effort need be made to furnish these pieces of evidence: they can be quickly gathered at a computer. If the police have no concrete evidence, they suggest and insinuate that the man has been unfaithful, or at least that he doesn’t truly care about her but is simply using her. At this point the officers explain that at the first opportunity, this man who does not love her will give her up to save his own skin, will allow her to be blamed for his crimes. Perhaps he has already done so.
Just as the officers are explaining to the woman how her partner has been unfaithful and duplicitous, and would easily let her hang for his crimes, so they present the man with evidence of her betrayals. They show him statements she signed down at the precinct detailing his activities, or the call sheet filled out at the Warrant Unit, where, after repeated raids on her house, she phoned to tell authorities where he was hiding. They may also show him evidence that she has cheated on him, which they collect by tracking her cell phone, bills, and purchases, or from statements given by other men and women who are part of the couple’s circle.
In short, the police denigrate the man and the relationship to the point that a woman cannot protect him and continue to think of herself as a person of worth. In anger and hurt, and saddled with the new fear that this man who doesn’t love her may try to blame her for his misdeeds, leaving her to rot in prison, a woman becomes increasingly eager to help the police.
Moral Appeals
The previous techniques of persuasion work by weakening the bonds between the woman and the man the police are pursuing. Moral appeals to the value of imprisonment operate on the opposite principle: they rely on the strength of the woman’s attachment, and play on her resolve to help and protect him. Specifically, moral appeals involve adjusting what the woman believes to be the right thing to do concerning the man she loves.
Before the police come knocking, a woman may believe that it is best for the man in her life to stay out of prison. He will go crazy in his cell, he will get stabbed, or get AIDS, or have an unhealthy diet. The prison won’t see to his medical needs, like his diabetes or the worrisome bullets lodged in his body.11 He will lose his job if he has one, or find it more difficult to find work once he comes home. Being in a cell day after day, cut off from society, with guards barking orders at him, he will become dehumanized, and normal life will become unfamiliar to him. To keep him from this fate, sacrifices must be made.
The police explain to the woman that this logic is flawed. In fact, the man would benefit from a stay in prison. He needs to make a clean break from his bad associates. It is not safe for him on the streets; he might be killed if he continues to sell drugs, or may overdose, if his proclivities run that way. He is spiraling deeper and deeper into dangerous behavior; jail will be a safe haven for him. Going to prison will teach him a lesson; he will emerge a better man, one more capable of caring for her and the children. The drama must end, they tell her, his drama and the drama that comes because of all the police activity. He has too many legal entanglements, too many court cases, warrants, probation sentences. He will be better able to find work without the warrants. It would be better if the man simply got it over with and began his life afresh. She can help him; she can save him before it is too late. He will thank her one day for this tough love.
A variant on this line of persuasion is that while it may not be best for the man to go to prison, it will be best for the family as a whole. Protecting the man means that she risks losing her children and her home; the bail in her name means that she could go into debt to the city and be jailed if she cannot pay it. His actions also expose her children to bad people and bad things. As a responsible mother, sister, or daughter, she should save her family and turn him in.
Promises of Confidentiality and Other Protections
The police’s techniques of persuasion are often bolstered by promises that no information she provides will be shared with the man or with anyone else among her acquaintance. In twenty-one of the twenty-four raids that I witnessed, officers told family members that the man would never be made aware that they had given him up. During the two questionings I was involved in, the police assured me of my confidentiality, and when women recounted their own interrogations, they mentioned that the same promise was made to them the majority of the time.
The Multipronged Approach
Violence, threats, disparaging evidence, moral appeals, and promises of protection are analytically separable, but the police often deploy these techniques in tandem, each serving to strengthen and reinforce the other.
It was difficult for me to observe women’s interrogations, because they were conducted behind closed doors at the police department, and women were reluctant to recount their experience once they got back home. For these reasons, I have used my own interrogation as an example.
This interrogation is notable because the police made use of many of the techniques described above, despite having very little to work with: they did not know what my relationship was to the men they were interested in; I was not living in public housing; I had no children; and neither I nor anyone in my immediate family had an arrest history or pending legal problems.
I had dropped Mike and Chuck off on 6th Street and was heading toward the airport to pick up a friend. Two unmarked cars come up behind me, a portable siren on top of the first one, and I pull over. A cop walks over to my window and shines a flashlight in my face; he orders me to step out of the car and show him my license. Then one of the cops tells me I am coming with them.
I leave the car on 2nd Street and get into the backseat of their car, a green Lincoln. The white cop in the back with me would have been skinny if not for the bulletproof vest, holster, gun, nightstick, and whatever else he had in his belt. He cracks bubble-gum hard and smells like the stuff Mike and Chuck use to clean their guns. On the way to the precinct, the white cop who is driving tells me that if I am looking for some Black dick, I don’t have to go to 6th Street; I could come right to the precinct at 8th and Vine. The Black cop in the passenger side grins and shakes his head, says something about how he doesn’t want any of me; he would probably catch some shit.
At the precinct, another white guy pats me down. He is smirking at me as he touches my hips and thighs. There is a certain look of disdain, or perhaps disgust, that white men sometimes give to white women whom they believe to be having sex with Black men—Black men who get arrested, especially.
They take me up the stairs to the second floor, the Detective Unit. I sit in a little room for a while, and then the two white cops come in, dark-green cargo pants and big black combat boots, and big guns strapped onto their legs. They remove the guns and put them on the table facing me. One cop leafs through a folder and puts pictures in front of me of Mike, then Chuck, then Reggie. Most of the pictures are of 6th Street, some taken right in front of my apartment. Some mug shots. Of the forty or so pictures he shows me, I knew about ten men by name and recognize another ten. They question me for about an hour and a half. From what I remember many hours later:
Is Mike the supplier? Do you think he’ll protect you when we bring him in? He won’t protect you! Who has the best stuff, between Mike and Steve, in your expert opinion? We know you were around here last week when all that shit went down. (What shit?) We saw you on 2nd Street, and we know you’re up on 4th Street. What business do you have up 4th Street? I hate to see a pretty young girl get passed around so much. Do your parents know that you’re fucking a different nigger every night? The good cop counters with: All we want to do is protect you. We are trying to help you. We’re not going to tell him you gave us any information. This is between us. No paper trail. Did you sign anything when you came in? No. Nobody knows you are even here. The bad cop: If you can’t work with us, then who will you call when he’s sticking a gun to your head? You can’t call us! He’ll kill you over a couple of grams. You know that, right? You better hope whoever you’re fucking isn’t in one of the pictures you’re looking at here, because all of these boys, see them? Each and every one of them will be in jail by Monday morning. And he’ll be the first one to drop your name when he’s sitting in this chair. And then it’s conspiracy, obstruction of justice, harboring a fugitive, concealing narcotics, firearms. How do you think we picked you up in the first place? Who do you think is the snitch? What is your Daddy going to say when you call him from the station and ask him to post your bail? Bet he’d love to hear what you are doing. Do you kiss him with that mouth?
. . .
To fully grasp the effect of these techniques of persuasion on women, we must understand the broader context of police violence in which they occur.
Between November 2002 and April of 2003, I spent a large part of every day with Aisha and her friends and relatives, who lived about fifteen blocks away from 6th Street. From the steps of her building or walking around the adjacent blocks, on fourteen occasions, a little more than twice a month, we watched the police beat up people as they were arresting them. Here is one account from the fall of 2007:
It is late afternoon, and Aisha and I are sitting on the stoop, chatting with her aunt and her older cousin. Aisha’s mother sits next to us, waiting for her boyfriend to come with five dollars so that she can finish her laundry.
A white police officer jogs by, his torso weaving awkwardly, his breath coming loud enough for us to hear. Then I notice a young man running a little ahead of him, also out of breath, as if he had been running for a long time. The man slows to a walk, and leans down with his hands on his knees. The cop approaches him, running in this stilted way, and grabs the back of his neck with one hand, pushing him down to the ground. Drawing his nightstick, he straddles the man in a half crouch, and begins hitting him in the back and neck with it.
Two of Aisha’s neighbors get up off the steps and quietly approach the scene, keeping some yards away. Aisha makes no move to get up; nor does her aunt or cousin. But we lean over to see.
Police cars pull up to the corner with sirens and lights on, first one then another, then another, blocking the street off. They handcuff the young man, whose face is now covered in blood, especially the side that had been scraped across the cement.
The police move the man to the cop car, and one cop places his hand on top of the man’s head to guide him into the backseat. Then they look around on the ground, apparently searching the area for something. Two of the cops speak into walkie-talkies.
“He must have had a gun or drugs on him,” Aisha’s aunt says.
“I didn’t see nothing,” a neighbor replies.
When the police cars begin to pull off, a neighbor says that she saw one cop punch the man in the face after he was already cuffed.
Aisha’s cousin, a stout young man of nineteen, gets up off the steps.
“Yo, I’m out, Aisha. It’s too hot on your block.”
“Okay,” she laughs. “Tell your mom I said hi.”
An elderly woman comes out after a few minutes with a bucket of bleach and water and pours it over the sidewalk, to clean the blood. Aisha and I go back to talking about her boyfriend, who has just received a sentence of fifteen years in federal prison. As the day goes on, I notice that Aisha and her family make no mention of what we have seen. Perhaps because they don’t know the man personally, this event is not important enough to recount to those not present when it occurred.
That summer was punctuated by more severe police action. On a hot afternoon in July, Aisha and I stood on a crowded corner of a major commercial street and watched four officers chase down her older sister’s boyfriend and strangle him. He was unarmed and did not fight back. The newspapers reported his death as heart failure. In August, we visited an old boyfriend of Aisha’s shortly after he got to county jail. Deep lacerations covered his cheeks, and his eyes had swollen to tiny slits. The beating he took while being arrested, and the subsequent infection left untreated while he sat in quarantine, took most of the vision from his right eye.
In interviews, Warrant Unit officers explained to me that this violence represents official (if unpublicized) policy, rather than a few cops taking things too far. The Philadelphia police I interviewed have a liberal understanding of what constitutes reasonable force, and a number of officers told me that they have orders from their captains that any person who so much as touches a cop “better be going to the hospital.”
In sum, the police apply a certain amount of violence to women to get them to talk, but substantially more to men as they chase them down and arrest them. The violence that women witness and hear about fixes what the police are capable of doing firmly in their minds. This knowledge likely spurs their cooperation, should the police desire it.
BECOMING A SNITCH OR AN ABANDONER
As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, as they raid a woman’s house and pull her in for questioning, the woman’s public reckoning begins. Relatives, neighbors, and friends watch to see how she will hold up as the police threaten to arrest her, to evict her, or to take her children away.
When the raids and interrogations begin, many women find that they cannot live up to the hopes they and others had for their conduct. Rather than be the man’s “ride-or-die chick,” they implore him to turn himself in. Rather than hide him and help him survive, they kick him out of the house and cut off all contact, perhaps leaving him without food or shelter. Rather than remain silent in the face of police questioning, they give up all the information they can.
Shortly after Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, had given birth to their second child, the police came to his mother’s house looking for him on a gun charge. When Marie heard this news, she called me on the phone to discuss it and, in between her screams and cries, explained her concerns for him:
You remember last time? He stopped eating! And then they put him in the hole [solitary confinement] for no reason. Remember how he was in the hole? I can’t take those calls no more. He was really losing it. No sunlight. Nobody to talk to. Plus, he could get stabbed up, or get AIDS. How I’m supposed to take care of the baby? They don’t care he got a bullet in his hip. Won’t none of them guards pay attention to that, and I can tell it’s getting ready to come out [push through the skin].
Firm in her conviction that Mike would suffer in jail, and determined to keep her growing family together, Marie promised to do whatever she could to protect him from the authorities.
Then the police paid a visit to Marie’s house. They came early in the morning, waking up the baby. They didn’t search the house, but sat and talked with her about the necessity of turning Mike in.
I came over that afternoon. Visibly shaken, Marie seemed to have adopted quite a different view of things:
MARIE: He needs to get away from these nut-ass niggas out here, Alice. It’s not safe for him on the streets; he could get killed out here. He needs to go in there, get his mind right, and come out here—
MARIE’S MOTHER:—and act like a man.
MARIE: Yes. Because the drama has to stop, Alice. He has too much stuff [legal entanglements]. He needs to go in and get all that taken care of. How he supposed to get a job when he got two warrants on him? He needs a fresh start. He ain’t going to like it, but he going. Soon as I see him [I’m calling the number on the card the police gave me].
In fact, Marie did not call the police on Mike right away; she tried to persuade him to turn himself in. Mike refused, and Marie continued to try to “talk some sense into him” over the next few days. She called the number on the card on the fifth day, after a second visit from the police. As they drove him off in handcuffs, we sat on the stoop and talked.
MARIE: I know he not going to take my visits right away but I don’t care, like, it had to be done. It’s too much drama, Alice. He can call me a snitch, I don’t care. I know in my heart—
MARIE’S MOTHER:—that was the right thing to do.
After Marie got Mike taken away, he castigated her daily from jail and spread the word that she had snitched. This, she said, was nothing compared to the internal anguish she felt over betraying the father of her two children, and her most trusted friend. The pains of his confinement, she explained, rested on her shoulders:
Every time he hungry in there, or he lonely, or the guards is talking shit to him, that’s on my head. Every time he miss his son—I did that to him.
THE TRUE RIDER
Overwhelmingly, women who come under police pressure cave: they cut off ties to the man they had promised to protect, or they work with the police to get him arrested and convicted. When this happens, women suffer public humiliation and private shame, and face the difficult task of salvaging their moral worth in the wake of their betrayals. Most often, the relationship is permanently ruined; to salvage her dignity, the woman may start over with a new man in a new social scene—perhaps a few blocks away, or better yet, in another neighborhood. Four times I observed women pack up and move after being publicly labeled a snitch.
I witnessed a number of situations in which the police pressure never materialized. The man turned himself in, or wasn’t pursued after all, or the police caught up to him quickly and so didn’t get around to putting pressure on his girlfriend or relatives. In these cases, the woman doesn’t have to manage her spoiled identity or reconstruct her relationship, because she didn’t have to resort to betraying her boyfriend, brother, or son.
In other cases, a woman is able to support and protect the man because the police don’t connect her to him, and therefore don’t put pressure on her or her family directly. Because a man’s main girlfriend and close relatives tend to be known to the police and targeted for information, he often finds his inner circle untrustworthy, while someone with whom he has a weaker connection—a new friend, an old girlfriend, or a more distant cousin—turns out to be the true rider.
Most of the time, women who are identified by the police cave quickly under their pressure. But a few women around 6th Street showed remarkable strength in resisting them. Miss Linda’s ability to resist police pressure was widely recognized in the 6th Street community. As Mike once proclaimed to a small crowd assembled on her steps after a raid, “She might be a thief and her house might be dirty as shit, but Miss L ain’t talking. She don’t care if they bang her door in, she don’t give a fuck!”
Miss Linda would often say that she rode hard for her three sons because she had more heart than other women, but the truth of the matter was that she also had more practice. Chuck, Reggie, Tim, and their friends and associates brought the law to her house on at least twenty-three occasions during my six years on 6th Street.12
When her middle son, Reggie, was seventeen, the police stopped him for loitering on the corner, and he allowed them to search him. An officer discovered three small bags of crack in the lining of his jeans, and Reggie started running. The cops lost him in the chase, and an arrest warrant was issued for possession of drugs with intent to distribute.
That evening, Miss Linda prepared her house for the raid she seemed sure was coming. She located the two guns that Reggie and his older brother, Chuck, had hidden in the ceiling, and stashed them at a neighbor’s. She did the same with Chuck’s bulletproof vest, his bullets, and the tiny plastic baggies he used to hold the small amounts of crack he was selling at the time. She took her marijuana stash, along with her various crack-smoking paraphernalia, to her boyfriend’s house three blocks up. And after some effort, she secured accommodations for Chuck’s close friend Anthony, who had been sleeping in their basement and had a bench warrant out for failure to appear. She let her neighbors know that the police were coming so that their sons and cousins could go elsewhere for the night. (This was in case the police got the wrong house, which had happened before, or in case they decided to search the houses nearby.) She dug out the sixty dollars Reggie had hidden in the wall, as the police typically take whatever cash they find. She persuaded her father, Mr. George, to sleep at his girlfriend’s place that night, in case “the law gives him a coronary.”
Though Miss Linda had instructed Reggie to leave the house before midnight, he fell asleep by accident, and was still there when a three-man SWAT team busted the door in at about four in the morning. (The door remains broken and unlocked to this day.) Miss Linda had slept on the couch in preparation and, unsure if Reggie was still in the house, launched into a heated argument with the officers to delay their going upstairs. This ruse proved successful. According to Reggie, he was able to leave through a window in his bedroom and run through the alley before they could catch him.
The next night, three officers returned and ordered Reggie’s younger brother, Tim, and Mr. George to lie facedown on the floor with their hands on their heads while they searched the house. According to Tim, an officer promised Miss Linda that if she gave Reggie up, they would not tell him that she was the one who had betrayed him. If she did not give her son up, the officer said he’d call Child Protective Services and have her youngest son taken away, because the house was infested with roaches, covered in cat shit, and unfit to live in. On this night, she again refused to tell the police where Reggie was.
Shaken but triumphant, Miss Linda came out early the next morning to tell her friends and neighbors the story. We sat on her iron back-porch steps that look out onto the shared alleyway.
MISS LINDA: I do my dirt, I’m the first to admit it. Some people say I’m a bad mother. You can say what you want about me, but everybody knows I protect my sons. All three of them. These girls out here can talk all they want, but watch when the fucking law comes BAM! knocks they door in. Don’t none of these girls know about that. They can talk, but won’t none of them ride like me. Only some females is true riders, and I’m one of them females. [Takes a drag from her cigarette, nods her head confidently. Grins.] They can come back every night.
When her cousin came to sit with us, Miss Linda repeated the story, adding that she had deliberately worn her sexiest lingerie for the raid, and had proudly stuck out her chest and butt when the officer was cuffing her against the wall. She acted this out to shrieks of laughter. She said that she told a particularly good-looking officer, “Honey, you so fine, you can search me anytime!”
Later in the day, more police officers came to search the house, and while they were pulling it apart once again, Reggie phoned to see if they were still there and if his mother was alright. Sitting not two feet from one of the officers, she coolly replied, “Yeah, Mom-Mom. I got to call you back later, because the police are here looking for Reggie. You haven’t seen him, have you? Okay, alright. I’ll call you back later. I’ll pick up the Pampers when I go food shopping.”
When the police left, Miss Linda told me: “Big George [her father] is going to tell me to clean this shit up as soon as he comes in. But I’m not cleaning till next week. They’re going to keep coming, and I’m not putting this house back together every fucking morning.”
I was there two nights later when the police raided Miss Linda’s house for the third time. On this night, three officers put plastic cuffs on us and laid us facedown on the living room floor while they searched the house. Despite her previous boasts of telling off the police and propositioning them with “I got three holes, pick one,” Miss Linda cried and screamed when they dropped her to the floor. An officer mentioned that the family was lucky that Mr. George owned the house: if it were a Section 8–subsidized building, Miss Linda and her sons could be immediately evicted for endangering their neighbors and harboring a fugitive. (Indeed, I had seen this happen recently to two other families.) Upstairs, the police found a gun that Miss Linda couldn’t produce a permit for; they arrested her and took her to the police station. When Tim and I picked her up that afternoon, she said she was told that she would face gun charges unless she told the police where to find Reggie. They also promised her anonymity, though she said she didn’t believe them for a second.
By her own and Tim’s accounts Miss Linda had been quite stalwart up until this point, but the third raid and the lengthy interrogation seemed to weaken her resolve. When Reggie came around later to pick up the spaghetti she had prepared for him, she begged him to turn himself in. He refused.
A week later, Miss Linda was coming home from her boyfriend’s house and found her TV and clothing dumped in the alleyway. Her father, Mr. George, told her that he would no longer allow her to live there with Tim if she continued to hide Reggie from the police:
This ain’t no damn carnival. I don’t care who he is, I’m not letting nobody run through this house with the cops chasing him, breaking shit, spilling shit, waking me up out of my sleep. I’m not with the late-night screaming and running. I open my eyes and I see a nigga hopping over my bed trying to crawl out the window. Hell, no! Like I told Reggie, if the law run up in here one more time I be done had a stroke. Reggie is a grown-ass man [he was seventeen]. He ain’t hiding out in my damn house. We going to fuck around and wind up in jail with this shit. They keep coming, they going to find some reason to book my Black ass.
Mr. George began calling the police whenever he saw Reggie in the house, and Miss Linda told her son that he could no longer stay there. For two months, Reggie lived in an abandoned Buick LeSabre parked in a nearby alleyway.
Here under extreme duress, Miss Linda nonetheless refused to tell the police where to find Reggie. And though she ultimately begged him to turn himself in, and then kicked him out of the house when her father threatened to evict her, she never gave her son up to the police. While Reggie was sleeping in the Buick, she kept in close touch with him, supplying him with food almost every evening. Her neighbors and family, and Reggie himself, seemed to believe that she had done the best she could, better than anyone else could have done. The evening the cops took Reggie in, I sat with Miss Linda and some of her neighbors. She poured Red Irish Rose wine into small plastic cups for us.
MISS LINDA: Well, at least he don’t have to look over his shoulder anymore, always worried that the law was going to come to the house. He was getting real sick of sleeping in the car. It was getting cold outside, you know, and plus, Reggie is a big boy and his neck was all cramped up. And he used to come to the back like: “Ma, make me a plate,” and then he’d come back in twenty minutes and I’d pass him the food from out the window.
Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, responded, “You ride harder than any bitch out here, and Reggie knows that.”
THE RIDER REBORN
Veronica was eighteen when she met Reggie, who was nineteen. She had been dating one of Reggie’s friends, though not seriously, and this man never had much time for her. He would leave her with Reggie while he was busy, and as Reggie put it, one thing led to another. Soon Veronica was spending most evenings at Reggie’s. Chuck and Tim were starting to call her Sis.
“At first I couldn’t fall asleep,” she told me a few weeks into this relationship. “I was scared the bugs would crawl on me at night. You really have to love a Taylor brother to sleep in that house.” Indeed, the kitchen crawled with roaches, ants, and flies; the floors themselves looked like they were moving, as if you were in some psychedelic bug dream.
One night, Veronica woke up thinking that the roaches were crawling on the bed again, only to see Reggie scrambling to make it out the window while yelling at her to push him through. This was not easy, as Reggie is a young man of substantial girth. Then two cops busted through the bedroom door and threw Veronica out of the bed. They cuffed her to the bed frame for an hour while they searched the house, she told me the next day, even though it should have been plain to them that Reggie had fled through the still-open window, which naturally would be shut in February. She said they told her they’d find out every illegal thing she did, every time she smoked weed or drove drunk, and they’d pick her up every time they came across her. They would put a special star in her file and run her name, and search her and whoever she was with whenever they saw her. They told her they had tapped her cell phone and could bring her up on conspiracy charges. Despite these threats, Veronica couldn’t tell them where Reggie had run, because she simply did not know.
Later that day, Reggie called her from a pay phone in South Philly. Veronica pleaded with him to turn himself in. He refused, and she told him then and there that they were through.
Reggie put Veronica “on blast,” telling his friends, relatives, and neighbors that she had cut him loose when the police started looking for him. He then began seeing Shakira, a woman he had dated in high school.
The next day, Veronica called me in tears: Reggie had told everyone on the block that she wasn’t riding right, that she didn’t really give a fuck about him, and that she was out as soon as shit got out of hand. He told her he would never have expected it, thought she was better than that.
As Veronica retreated from 6th Street, Shakira stepped up to help Reggie hide. She met him at his friend’s house, and spent the next few days holed up in the basement with him. She arranged for a friend to bring them food. In the meantime, the police raided Miss Linda’s house, Veronica’s house, and Reggie’s uncle’s house. But they didn’t visit Shakira’s house or question her family, which seemed to allow her to preserve her role as a brave and loyal person. I went to see her and Reggie on the third day.
SHAKIRA: I been here the whole time, A. When they [the police] came to his mom’s we was both there, and he went out the back and I been here this whole time.
REGGIE: She riding hard as shit.
ALICE: That’s what’s up [that’s good].
REGGIE: Remember Veronica? When she found out the boys [the police] was looking for me, she was like: click [the sound of a phone hanging up]. She’d be like, “I see you when I see you.” Shakira ain’t like that, though; she riding like a mug [motherfucker, i.e. very hard]. She worried about me, too.
We didn’t hear from Veronica for a few weeks, and then the police found Reggie hiding in another shed nearby. They came in cars and helicopters, shutting down the block and busting open the shed with a battering ram.
When Reggie could make a phone call, he let Veronica know that he wasn’t seeing Shakira anymore. Veronica wrote him a letter, and then she started visiting him. It took three hours on the bus to get to Northeast Philadelphia where the county jails are, because the routes don’t line up well. Veronica had never visited a guy in jail before, and we’d often discuss what outfit she could wear to look her best while complying with the jail’s regulations.
As Veronica made the weekly trek to the county jail on State Road, Reggie’s friends stayed home. They didn’t write; they didn’t put any money on his books.
Every day, Reggie voiced his frustration with his boys over the phone to me:
Niggas ain’t riding right! Niggas ain’t got no respect. G probably going to do it [put money on his books], but Steve be flajing [bullshitting; lying]. When I come home, man, I’m not fucking with none of these niggas. Where the fuck they at? They think it’s going to be all love when I come home, like, what’s up, Reggie, welcome back and shit. . . . But fuck those niggas, man. They ain’t riding for me, I got no rap for them when I touch [get home]. On my word, A, I ain’t fucking with none of them when I get home. I would be a fucking nut for that. Brandon especially, A. I was with this nigga every day. And now he’s on some: “My bad, I’m fucked up [broke].” Nigga, you wasn’t fucked up when I was out there! I banged on that nigga, A [hung up on him].
Despite their continued promises to visit and to send money, after three months not one of Reggie’s boys had made the trip. Only Veronica came. She wrote him about two letters every week, with him writing two or maybe three letters back. Sometimes she and I would go together to visit him. On Reggie’s birthday, Veronica wrapped a tiny bag of marijuana in a twenty-dollar bill and smuggled it to him in the visiting room.
One afternoon, Veronica and I were sitting on Miss Linda’s second-floor porch playing Spades with her. Though usually quiet, Veronica spoke for the longest I’d heard:
Ain’t none of his boys go visit him, none of them. . . . The only people that visit is me and Alice. Like, that should tell him something. Your homies ain’t really your homies—I’m the only one that’s riding. I’m the only real friend he got. Who’s putting money on your books? They said they was going to put some on there, but they ain’t do it. The only money he got on his books is from me and you.
It seemed that Veronica, who had dropped Reggie while he was on the run, who was humiliated as a weak and disloyal person, was now, through the work of visiting and writing letters, reborn a faithful and stalwart companion.
A woman can also salvage her relationship and self-worth by gradually letting the details of a man’s confinement fade, and joining with him to paint her conduct in a more positive light. Eight times I noted that a woman visiting a man in custody would join with him to revise the events leading up to his arrest and trial in ways that downplayed her role in his confinement.
When Mike was twenty-four and his children were three and six years old, he began dating a woman from North Philly named Michelle. Within a month they had become very close: Michelle’s three-year-old son started calling Mike Daddy, and Michelle’s picture went up on Mike’s mother’s mantelpiece next to his graduation picture and the school photos of his son and daughter. He started spending most nights at her apartment.
Michelle was the first Puerto Rican woman Mike had ever dated, and he had high hopes that her ethnic background would signify strong loyalty. “With Spanish chicks,” he said, “it’s all about family. Family is everything to them. Black chicks ain’t like that. They love the cops.”
Michelle and Mike both explained to me that Michelle was nothing like the mother of Mike’s children, Marie, who so frequently called the police on him. Since Michelle’s father and brothers sold drugs, she was used to the police and the courts, and wouldn’t cave under their pressure. With strong memories of her mother struggling with her father’s legal troubles all through her childhood, Michelle told me that she was a second-generation rider. She also said that she loved Mike more than any man she had ever met, including her son’s father, who was currently serving ten years in federal prison.
Michelle’s loyalty would be tested three months into their relationship. Mike missed a court appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Upon hearing the news, Michelle assured me that nothing—not the cops, not the judge, not the nut-ass prison guards—would break them apart.
At around four o’clock the following Friday morning, she phoned me sobbing: the cops had knocked her door down and taken Mike. He tried to run, and they beat him out on the sidewalk with batons. She said they beat him so badly that she couldn’t stop screaming. Why did they have to do that? They had already put him in handcuffs.
At the precinct, the police kept Mike cuffed to a desk for eighteen hours in the underwear they had found him in. The next morning, they brought Michelle down to the station and questioned her for three hours. Then they showed Mike Michelle’s statement, which detailed his activities, his associates, and the locations of his drug-selling business. When he got to county jail, he wrote her a letter, which she showed me:
Don’t come up here, don’t write, don’t send no money. Take all your shit from my mom’s, matter of fact, I’ll get her to drop that shit off. You thought I wasn’t going to find out that you a rat? They showed me everything. Fuck it. I never gave a fuck about you anyway. You was just some pussy to me, and your pussy not even that good!
Mike spread the word that Michelle was a snitch, and this news was the hot topic for a few days between his boys on the block and those locked up.
Incensed and humiliated, Michelle explained to me that Mike had no right to be angry with her. He clearly didn’t care about her. In fact, despite all his claims to the contrary, the police had shown her the text messages and phone calls that proved he was still seeing Marie. Not only that, but Mike had tried to pin the drugs on her and to claim that the gun in the apartment belonged to her father. Michelle wrote him a scathing letter back:
I should have known that you were still messing with your baby-mom. I felt like a fool when they showed me your cell phone calls and texts at 2 and 3 in the morning. And don’t even try to tell me that you were calling your kids, ’cause no 7 year old is up at 2 a.m. Did you think I wasn’t going to find out you tried to put that shit on me? I read every word. That bitch can have you.
With concrete evidence of Mike’s infidelity, Michelle came to see that Mike did not value or respect her: their relationship had been a sham. She began to regard her past association with him as sordid and shameful, and her present efforts to protect him humiliating. At the same time, the police were showing Mike that she had betrayed him. Injured and humiliated, he rebuffed and belittled her just as she faced indisputable evidence of his duplicity, and confronted the possibility that this man who didn’t love her might let her hang for his crimes.
Two days later, the cops took Michelle out to the suburbs where Mike had been selling. According to the police report, she gave up his stash spot, his runner, and all the customers she knew about.13
A friend of Mike’s explained it like this:
The girl said, “Fuck it, I’ve only known him for three months, I want to keep my kid.” Plus, her mom is in a nursing home, and she has custody of her two little sisters, so you know they told her they was going to kick her out the spot (the Section 8 building) and take her son and her sisters and shit. She has too much on the line. That bitch ain’t think twice. She was like: What do you want to know?
After Mike’s mother and grandmother and I attended his court dates and saw Michelle’s statement, Mike declared that she was a snitch, and stopped talking to her for a while. The news spread quickly to Mike’s boys—both those on the block and those locked up.
Though at first Michelle was able to justify her actions by noting that the police had threatened to take her children away and that Mike had in fact been cheating on her, these details seemed to have been forgotten in the neighborhood’s collective memory as the weeks dragged on, and she increasingly came to feel that she had betrayed a good man. As his trial dates came and went, she began visiting him more often, and sending money and letters. Slowly, Michelle and Mike began to reconcile.
Some months later, Mike and I were chatting in the visiting room. He mentioned that the girlfriend of one of his friends had recently testified against that man in court. “She’s a fucking rat,” Mike said. “She don’t give a fuck about him.” We debated the circumstances of this, and I commented on how difficult it is to remain silent when the police threaten to evict you or take your kids. As an example, I noted that while Michelle clearly loved Mike, she had informed on him under just this kind of police pressure.
At this point our weekly gossip turned into a heated argument. Other visitors in the room began to stare as Mike forcefully explained to me that Michelle had not snitched. In fact, it was the woman in whose house he had been renting a room that had given the statement against him.
“You supposed to be keeping tabs! Like, that’s your job. You’re getting stupid. You used to remember every fucking thing.”
“I really thought it was Michelle,” I replied limply.
“What the fuck good are you if you can’t even get basic shit right?”
My confidence as the group’s chronicler quite shaken, I apologized profusely. At his next court date a month later, I asked Mike’s lawyer to show me the statement again. Checking over the lengthy police report, I realized that my notes were accurate. Michelle had informed on Mike, on three separate occasions. I wasn’t sure whether she had convinced Mike that she had remained silent, or they were both simply trying to put it behind them, but I decided it would be best not to bring it up again.
On our next visit, Mike lamented that one of his boys was continuing to call Michelle a snitch.
“Niggas is gonna hate,” he said. “That’s been my whole life, since middle school. Everybody wants what I got.”
I nodded my head in solidarity.
THE DIZZYING JOURNEY FROM RIDER TO SNITCH
Many women in the 6th Street neighborhood view the forcible and unexpected removal of a boyfriend, brother, or son to be, as Mike’s girlfriend once put it, “the end of everything.” When a woman gets the news that the police may be after the man in her life, she may take it as her obligation to help him hide from the authorities. Through protecting him, she makes a claim for herself as a loyal girlfriend or a good mother, an honorable and moral human being.
If the police never come looking for the man, she can continue to believe that she would do her utmost to shield him from the authorities, should the occasion for bravery and sacrifice arise. But if the police do come, they typically put pressure on her to provide information.
For the police and the district attorney, the task of turning intimates into informants is mostly a technical problem, one of many that arise in the work of rounding up and processing enough young men to meet informal arrest quotas and satisfy their superiors. But the role the police ask women to play in the identification, arrest, and conviction of the men they love presents deeper problems for women: problems for their sense of self.
To be sure, some of the women I came to know on 6th Street didn’t seem to care very much whether their legally entangled family members or neighbors were in jail or not. Some even considered the confinement of these troublesome young men a far preferable alternative to dealing with them on the outside. But those who took these positions tended to keep their distance from the men the police were after, and consequently tended not to know enough about their whereabouts to be very useful to the authorities. It is the women actively involved in the daily affairs of legally precarious men who prove most helpful in bringing about their arrest, so those women who consider the possible confinement of a son or boyfriend a grave event, a wrenching apart of their daily life, are the ones the police enlist to capture and confine them.
When the police begin their pressure, when they raid a woman’s house or pull her in for questioning, a woman faces a crisis in her relationship and in the image she has of herself: the police ask her to help imprison the very man she has taken it as a sacred duty to protect. Not only do the police ask her, they make her choose between her own security and his freedom. For many of the women I have come to know on 6th Street, this choice is one they are asked to make again and again. It is part of what enduring the police and the prisons is about.
Relatives and neighbors looking in on this crisis from the outside may see a woman’s options in stark terms: she can prove herself strong in the face of threats and violence and protect the man, or she can cave under the pressure and betray him. If she withstands the police, she will garner public acclaim as a rider. If she caves, she will suffer humiliation as an abandoner or an informant.
But as a woman comes under increasing police pressure, her perspective on right and wrong begins to shift. As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, she finds herself increasingly cut off from the man she loves, and interacting more and more with the authorities. The techniques they use to gain her cooperation turn her basic understandings about herself and her significant others upside down. She learns that her children and her home aren’t safe, nor are the other people she holds dear. She begins to see her daily life as an almost endless series of crimes, for which she may be arrested at any moment the police see fit. She learns that the man she loves doesn’t care about her, and comes to see her involvement with him as sordid, shameful, and pathetic.
As the police show the woman that her boyfriend has cheated, or that her son may try to blame her for his crimes, she comes to realize that protecting him from the authorities may not be such a good idea after all. Threatened with eviction, the loss of her children, her car, or all future housing benefits, her resolve to shield him weakens. By the time the police assure her of confidentiality, she begins to see the merits of working with the authorities.
. . .
There is an excitement surrounding wanted men. They are, in a certain way, where the action is.14 But wanted men also stop coming around as much or as routinely. Their contributions to the household, though perhaps meager to begin with, may cease altogether. Their life on the run may be exciting, but it is a holding pattern; it has no forward motion. To some degree, a man’s wanted status demands that a woman live in the present, and this present is a dizzying and uncertain one.
Out of this morass, the police offer the woman a dubious path: she can turn against the man; she can come over to their side. As she begins to orient herself to the their way of thinking, she finds a way out of the dizzying holding pattern created by the man’s evasion and the police’s pressure. She is now able to chart some forward path, and leave the upside-down world the raids and interrogations have created. Maybe he will hate her and she will hate herself, but at least she is moving forward.
As the police make it harder for her to remain on the man’s side, they construct a vision of what life would be like without him, independent of the involvement with crime and with the police that he requires. They create a distinctive path for the woman that involves a change in how she judges herself and others.
A woman who contemplates changing sides discovers that a number of lines of action become available to her. She may urge the man to turn himself in, or, if pressure persists, she may give him an ultimatum: give yourself up or I will. She may openly call the police on the man, in plain view of their mutual family and friends. She may turn him in secretly, and attempt to conceal that she has cooperated with the authorities. Alternately, she may cut off ties with him, refuse to speak to him anymore, or kick him out of the house.
During this process, the pressure imposed by the police allows the woman to reconcile herself to her behavior, and the police’s techniques of persuasion come in handy as justifications for her actions. But when the man is taken into custody and the pressure from the police lifts, it becomes increasingly difficult for the woman and for the rest of the community to accept what she did. She must now deal head-on with the public humiliation and private shame that come with abandoning or informing on the man she professed to care for.
It is in the nature of policing that officers tend to interact most with those in whose behavior they find fault, such that the woman’s encounters with the police begin when she refuses to comply and end when she comes over to their side. That is, her intense and intimate association with the authorities lasts only for the duration of their denigration and her resistance. Once she cooperates and gives the man up, the police abandon their interest in her. At the moment she changes sides, she finds herself surrounded by neighbors and family who mock and disdain her, who consider her actions immoral and betraying.
Throughout this process, the woman takes a journey rife with emotional contradictions. The news that the man in her life has become wanted prompts a renewal of her attachment, such that she strengthens her commitment to him just as he ceases to play an active role in her daily life, to furnish her with any concrete future, or to assist her financially. When the man is taken into custody and the pressure to inform on him lifts, a woman can pledge her devotion once more and make amends. Unlike life on the run, his sentence or trial has a clear end point. She can coordinate her life around the visiting hours, and the phone calls in the morning and evening. She can make plans for his return.15 But since she has contributed to his confinement, her attempts to repair the relationship coincide with his most heated anger against her. Even if he forgives her, a woman can renew her commitment to him, and return to regarding him as good and honorable, only after he has left her daily life most completely, as he sits in jail or prison.
Once a woman’s son or partner is incarcerated, she may come full circle. As she did when she first got the news that the authorities might come looking, she returns to thinking that the police, the courts, and the prisons are unjust, and she will do just about anything to protect and support the man she loves.
A few skilled intimates do not travel the path the police put forward, as they are able to resist the pressure in the first place. They learn to anticipate raids, and to mitigate the damage that a raid may cause. They learn to make a scene and become a problem for police by vocally demanding their rights, by attracting a large audience, or by threatening to sue or go to the newspapers. They practice concerted silence, learning how to reveal as little as possible. They distract the officers from the direction the man ran, or the box in which incriminating evidence may be found. They also make counteroffers, such as sexual favors, or provide information about someone else the police might be interested in. Their refusal to cave under pressure means that their conduct calls for little explanation, and their relationships need few repairs.
Though some women manage to redeem their relationships, their reputations, and their sense of self after they cooperate, and a rare few are able to withstand police pressure and garner some honor and acclaim, it must be said that the police’s strategy of arresting large numbers of young men by turning their mothers and girlfriends against them goes far in creating a culture of fear and suspicion, overturning women’s basic understandings of themselves as good people and their lives as reasonably secure, and destroying familial and romantic relationships that are often quite fragile to begin with.