Keep Your Hands in Sight

When I first entered the Nail Trap beauty salon, everyone knew right away that I was a journalist. There were at least 2,000 of us in Ferguson last week. I guess we all look alike because someone hollered for the owner and pointed me out with their chin.

“Steve!”

Steve was in the back of the salon, filing the nails of 25-year-old Demetria. I approached Steve, a 23-year-old Asian man who wasn’t very chatty. CNN was on the big screen.

The two black women came to have their nails done by Steve’s expert hands. Thirty-two-year-old Pesh had a broken nail on her right index finger. She had really long nails that almost looked like claws, but I’ve got to say, they were really beautiful turquoise claws.

“What will happen in a month from now? Things will be back to normal.”

“Is that a good thing, Pesh?”

“Of course not! Not at all. Things have to change! The police don’t have the right to kill people like that ….”

Demetria stood and turned toward us, adding: “Things won’t get better any time soon. He’ll get away with it.”

“He” is Darren Wilson, the police officer that killed Michael Brown. Demetria didn’t need to clarify.

“Oh no, he’ll go to jail,” Pesh replied. “The entire planet is talking about him, it’s gone beyond Ferguson ….”

To get Steve, Demetria and Pesh talking, I raised the big issues: institutional racism, what electing the first black president had changed, and the legacy of slavery. A little longer and I would have quoted Maya Angelou.

I could see it in their eyes: stop it with your abstract ideas. Of course black people in the United States are the victims of racism. Bravo, stranger!

More than abstract ideas, what immediately and viscerally angers them is the police. Or as black women like Pesh and Demetria say, the poh-lice, by stretching the O.

“The problem is that the cops have ticket quotas to fill, just like in most small towns around here,” Pesh said.

To partially explain the hyper-conflictual relationship between the police and citizens in the U.S., allow me to take a statistical detour.

Ferguson has 21,203 inhabitants; 67 percent are black. There are 8,192 civic addresses. It’s more or less the size of Varennes.

What’s the second highest source of revenue in Ferguson? Tickets for breaking city and traffic by-laws. We’re talking $2,635,400 in 2013: $2,635,400 in tickets handed out by Ferguson’s 53 finest. That’s an average of $321 per address.

And if you don’t pay the ticket, the court will issue a warrant for your arrest. So the next time you run a red light or spit out gum on the sidewalk — bang! — you get cuffed. In 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued no less than 24,532 warrants — three per address.

Are you still following?

It may seem like I’m talking about municipal budgets, but I’m not. I’m talking about police brutality veiled by the law. I’m talking about a war on the poor waged in hundreds of cities and counties across the United States, and municipalities that are making their police officers hand out more and more tickets in order to raise funds — and sometimes to fund the police itself. For the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it’s a straight out war on the poor.

You can’t pay your ticket if you don’t have any money. Six months later, when you get stopped by a police officer, he’ll see that there’s a warrant for your arrest because of an unpaid ticket. No ifs, ands or buts — he’ll drive you to the county jail. You’ll rot there for maybe four or five days because the municipal court still isn’t sitting. You’ll lose your job. Try to pay off your tickets then.

It’s a vicious cycle that sends millions of Americans to prison every year because they’re too poor to pay their tickets, which are often given for trivial reasons.

ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-based organization, conducted a study on the persecution of the poor by the little gulag of regional municipal courts that sends you to jail if you can’t pay a ticket. Theoretically, the practice has been unconstitutional since the 19th century. But it continues today, thanks to all sorts of trickery and legal interpretations.

In Ferguson, 86 percent of citizens pulled over by the cops are black — but they only make up 67 percent of the population. White people (29 percent of the population) comprise 12 percent of vehicle stops.

According to the ArchCity Defenders report, black people are twice as likely to be searched as white people, and twice as likely to be arrested. “However, this data seems at odds with the fact that searches of black individuals result in discovery of contraband only 21.7 percent of the time, while similar searches of whites produce contraband 34.0 percent of the time ….”

This disgrace has been widely denounced by organizations that defend civil rights and liberties, like the ACLU. It disproportionately affects black people (which make up 35 percent of the prison population but only 13 percent of the general population).

This long statistical detour was to explain to you why so many people are scared of the police. For you, it may be the beginning of a downward spiral into indignation. It doesn’t explain everything. It may not explain the Michael Brown shooting. But it does explain the climate of hostility and suspicion.

That’s without considering that police officers can often be trigger-happy. You can blame it on racism or incompetence, but keep in mind that 300 million weapons are circulating in this country, the uncontested leader in gun deaths in the industrialized world by far.

That can make a cop nervous.

Pesh lives in Ballwin, which is 40 minutes from here. She explained to me that Ballwin isn’t like Ferguson. The cops are polite and courteous.

“Why?”

“Because in Ballwin, if the cops harass people, well, people take them to court, people complain ….”

That’s when Demetria loudly joined our conversation: “And when they complain, people listen!”

Ballwin, Missouri: 30,443 inhabitants. Budget: $17 million. Revenue generated by tickets: $950,000. Peanuts. A well-off little burg: median annual household income of $80,000. It’s $36,000 in Ferguson.

Ballwin is home to 415 black people, including Pesh. Ballwin is 89 percent white.

Pesh has a 14-year-old son. Like many African-American mothers, she is extremely afraid of what could happen if he crossed paths with the police.

“For the police, we’re the enemy. Well, young black men. They’re afraid of black people. That’s why the police disproportionately kill blacks ….”

When Pesh told me that, something immediately popped into my head. A song where a mother begs her teenage son to be polite if he’s ever stopped by a police officer. But what song, damn it? I couldn’t put my finger on it …. I wrote in my notebook, “Song?” while Pesh continued:

“I told my son that if he runs into a police officer, he has to be careful of what he does, what he says. And especially not act cocky. Be quiet, don’t do anything. And not look for anything in his pockets. I told him, ‘You’re dead if you do that’ ….”

There are no reliable statistics about the number of black people killed by the police. Some numbers appeared last week: From 2005 to 2012, American police officers apparently killed two black people every week. But police services aren’t obligated to report these deaths to the FBI, which dismissively compiles these data.

I left Pesh and her broken nail to darken my notebook on the streets of Ferguson. That night at the hotel, the name of the song came back to me. Bruce Springsteen, American Skin (41 Shots):

If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite

And that you’ll never ever run away

Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight

Springsteen was inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old New Yorker killed in 1999 by 14 bullets shot by four police officers.

Diallo was unarmed. He had nothing to do with the man the police were looking for. He was black.

You can get killed just for living in … You can get killed just for living in … You can get killed just for living in your American skin