The world outside looks different when you see it through the windows of a police car. And, when youâre in one, you can tell the world sure as hell looks differently at you.
Iâve been in police cars three times in my life, once in 1998 and then twice, in rapid succession, in late 2011.
I was in them by choice, first as a reporter and then as the victim of a crime. And, yeah, I get it. Iâm a well-off white guy talking about being in cop cars. I wasnât arrested. I wasnât a suspect. I wasnât harassed. I hadnât committed a crime. The cop cars I was in were safe places for me, but that made them no less revelatory regarding how I think about the good and bad of policing, crime and community.
Thereâs an in-car moment that struck me in the new police video game
Battlefield Hardline that I think nails the change in oneâs connection to the rest of the world that I experienced when I was in a real police vehicle. The game briefly puts you in a virtual one. Youâre a Cuban-American cop named Nick Mendoza, and your new partner is driving you through Miami. The cityâs residents have been programmed by the gameâs creators to interact with police driving through it. You get approached by a man asking for money. You see fellow cops handcuffing a man over the hood of a car. You see a woman rifling through trash.
You drive up to one intersection, and if you look to the right, youâll see this:
You control whether you look at those men. You canât interact with them, though. Still, the ambiguity of the scene is potent. Whatâs their problem with you, with the police pulling up nearby? Is it them? Is it you?
If youâre interested in the problems of policing in America, I imagine youâre partially interested in issues of empathy, issues of getting into the heads of cops and the people cops interact with. You might wonder about what cops see when they look at the people outside their cars or what they see down the sidewalk as they patrol a beat. You probably have your own feelings about what seeing cops in a cop car means to you. People have been protesting around the country because they are not okay with how policing works in America these days.
To figure this stuff out, we can share our own experiences with police and listen to others. Or maybe you are a cop or, as in my case, have friends and family who have served and can share their experiences, good and bad.
Video games can also play their own bit role. Iâve argued that the way they simulate environments and let gamers role-play can let them serve as
potential engines of empathy. There was a video game, for example, that let you experience the verbal harassment many women hear when walking down a city street. Then thereâs Grand Theft Auto V, where some players were convinced that the cops bothered you more when you played as the gameâs black protagonist than when you played as the white ones (the creators maintain it wasnât programmed that way).
I was struck by that moment in
Hardline, a game thatâs otherwise been criticized for not having anything sophisticated to say about modern policing. The whole ride through virtual Miami was interesting because it emphasized those divides between people in cop cars and people outside of them. It shows how different the world can look and, at least there, didnât provide easy explanations.
Obviously, my experience vis a vis the police is my own. Iâm a 5â6âł, 150-lb white guy who has never been treated by law enforcement as if Iâm a threat. Iâve never had the kind of encounters with police or police cars that many people of color talk about.
I donât think Iâve committed many crimes, either. Iâve also never been arrested. The closest I ever got was being grabbed by a cop after I jumped a turnstile in a midtown Manhattan subway station in the late 90s. (The cop didnât seem to care that Iâd paid my fare but been pushed back through the turnstile by someone exiting the station and that Iâd jumped after having paid my way.)
I live in Brooklyn, a borough away from Staten Island, where Eric Garner, who was merely selling loose cigarettes, was horrifyingly choked to death by a police officer while saying he couldnât breathe. I live just a neighborhood away from Bedford-Stuyvesant, where police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were ambushed and murdered by a man from Baltimore who claimed to be seeking revenge for the death of Garner and Missouri teenager Michael Brown. Late last year, I was sitting in my living room and could hear people marching on behalf of Brown just a block away. I went out to see as they went down the street.
My 2011 experiences in cop cars were illuminating and complex. Theyâve been on my mind, partially because of that
Hardline scene but also because my experiences happened on the same streets where Ramos and Liu were killed, the same streets where police helped me after a stranger stole my cellphone out of my hands.
It was late fall on a weekday morning, maybe 8am. I was in Brooklyn and had just finished running at a gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I ran there all the time, always with headphones plugged into my iPhone so I could listen to music.
I was walking the 15-minutes itâd take me to get home but for the efforts of a man who snuck up behind, unplugged my headphones from my phone, grabbed the phone and ran off.
I chased him on foot, tired as I was from my run. I yelled at him. âGive me back my fucking phone!â He kept zigzagging from block to block. Just about no one was around except for a guy he brushed past who warned me that the man had a gun. âNo, he doesnât,â I breathed back with foolish confidence.
The thief took a tight corner and lost me in a relatively crowded intersection. I stopped, shouting a question to anyone who could hear, saying what the guy was wearing, and avoiding that he was black because I was a white guy in a mostly black neighborhood and didnât think thatâd matter or help. No one replied. Who would want to get involved?
I walked a block, peering around for him or for police. When I saw a police car approaching an intersection, I just walked into the intersection to wave it down. It stopped for me. The cop inside lowered his window, and I explained my predicament. He ushered me into the back seat and radioed a descriptionâno hassle, no skepticism, no curiosity about the panting white guy who just blocked his car.
We drove slowly through a few more blocks of Bed-Stuy. Suddenly the neighborhood had never looked so vast, so full of people, so crowded with possible secrets.. Somewhere nearby was the guy who had just snatched my phone. This is one of the sharpest moments from that whole experience. I remember how different everyone looked, the sense I had that, even on a bright sunny morning, that shadows contained a robber, that a neighborhood contained a criminal. Itâs not how Iâd ever seen those streets.
Weâd only been driving around for a few minutes when we got a call on the radio. Theyâd found someone matching my guyâs description.
It seemed impossible. But a woman had called 911, probably a woman whoâd heard me yelling about the robber and had seen where he was hiding. We drove a couple of blocks more, toward another police car, an ally, and I saw, beyond, that the man who had stolen my phone was pressed up against a wall. We stopped. An officer approached us holding a walletâthe robberâsâand my phone. This was the most effective policing Iâd ever heard of.
There was an odd moment. You canât open the doors when youâre in the back of a police car. They have to open them for you. They did so that I could see my phone and confirm it was mine. I looked toward the thief and he yelled back⊠at me? At the police car? At the idea of me being in a police car? Iâm not sure.
We drove back to the precinct, where I got my phone back and a policewoman told me I had nice eyes. I donât run with my wallet, and we were now a long way from my home. I asked if any cops could give me a ride. One agreed to, and so I got into a police car for the third time in my life, this timeâfor the first timeâin the front seat. The officer was Asian-American. Years later, Iâd later frantically try to figure out if he was Wenjian Liu, who had been killed near the precinct where Iâd been helped. He was not.
As we pulled out of the precinctâs parking lot, we came to an intersection and stopped. This is where another of my strongest memories begins. We might have been at a red light or a stop sign. That I donât remember. A black man in a hard hat started walking through the crosswalk and looked at us. He said something to the officer driving the car, something about how far into the crosswalk our car was pulled. I didnât think we were that far in, but we might have been.
Whatever he said pissed the policeman off.
âYou mean this line?â the officer snarked back, accelerating for a split second and then braking. Our car lurched. Then he did it again. âThis line?!?â
The man in the hard hat looked angry. Eventually, we drove on.
âWe get no respect,â the officer told me.
Maybe I muttered âYeah.â
My mind was racing. None of that seemed productive. None of that seemed like itâd get anyone more respect. I remember thinking I didnât want to challenge him or upset him. His guys had just caught my thief, rescued my phone. He was driving me home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6qp3x6-3L4
That moment at the intersection came back to me when I was playing
Hardline. I think itâs key. Just what is happening there? What was happening at that intersection that autumn morning in 2011?
I can get in a cop car, but I canât really get into officerâs head. I canât see through the eyes of the guy in the crosswalk, either. And I sure havenât seen a video game that digs into what his perspective of a scene like that might be like.
Police are exceptional, as the critic Austin Walker described in
his review of Hardline. They donât quite fit in, and thatâs a good word to underscore that. He explains: âI donât mean that as a superlative: I mean that police act in ways we are denied. They speed down highways. They can intervene where social mores (and fears) keep us quiet. They wield the force of legitimized violence.â
If you wind up in a cop car voluntarily, youâll see that exceptionalism yourself. And youâll get to wondering who wants you around and who doesnât⊠and why. Being in cop cars didnât make me like the police more or less, but it helped me feel a little bit of what itâs like to be them; what itâs like to be given that sort of power, and some of the problems that can come of it.
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Top illustration by Jim Cooke. Police car photo by Leonard Zhukovsky | Shutterstock.com
