Tim Connolly wrote:
"olson stated in one of his first interviews as the new
chief when asked about race relations that a "fortress
mentality was over". i beg to disagree. the fortress
mentality is growing and has crossed color lines that
heretofore it had not crossed. it has crossed social
and economic lines it had not crossed."
Once upon a time, I knew that police abuses occurred and considered them a
bad thing, but I was comfortably certain that such abuses would never
affect me personally because I am a middle-aged white woman with a
middle-calss job. In the past twelve months, the police have attacked my
favorite coffee shop, terrorized political activists, and shot dead five
people including a white woman who was older and smaller than I am.
In that time, I've written some very critical things about the police in
various media: this forum, private email to Luther, letters to the editor,
letters to elected officials. So far, I haven't experienced any
retaliation. But find myself driving unusually cautiously. I got rid of
the car with the cracked windshield and when a headlight goes out, I
replace it immediately.
It's been awfully strange. I feel a little like Dorothy, only instead of
being in Oz, I have woken up on the one side of a brick wall when I thought
I belonged on the other.
I once knew a woman from Argentina who said that in Latin America, no one
every calls the police, no matter how bad the circumstances, because the
police will come and do something much worse. I think in the U.S. we've
been used to a system where whites and middle-class, suburban minorities
felt free to call the police when something was wrong, but poor or
inner-city minority members had a more Argintinian view. It was a bad
state of affairs, but everyone knew where they stood. Right now, I don't
know if I'm on the Argintinian system or the old U.S. system that I took
for granted as a middle-class white person.
Rosalind Nelson
Bancroft
