Trying To Give Our New Sheriff the Benefit of the Doubt

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

One night last week, after a very stressful day of work and more work and life, I’m just trying to relax with some Netflix. But my TV tees up a newscaster telling a story about Tyre Nichols, and I can’t change the channel fast enough. Don’t tell me those facts my mind pleads. I didn’t ask for this. I can’t handle it.

Frankly - I’ll just say it - I just can’t right now with the police. Yes, I realize it’s not all police but I think it’s reasonable while also deeply unreasonable to have to ask oneself how am I supposed to know if I’m in the presence of an ally or one of the bad apples who could just decide to take their shit out on a person and call it justified?

Not the greatest mindset to have last Friday, I’ll admit, as I beat a hasty path toward the immense county building for the swearing in of our newly elected Sheriff here in Santa Clara County. I’ve never been to a gathering like this, but I’m a newly elected local official and feel I should be here. Traffic was worse than I expected, although I should’ve known better.

I quickly make my way inside and down the long corridor toward the boardroom. I pass the D.A.’s office. The office of the Victim Advocate. Hushed voices farther down the hallway suggest I’m nearing the right room. It looks like they started right on time which makes me unfashionably late. Damn. A clerk hands me a program printed on thick card stock, and offers that it might still be possible for me to find a seat.

I enter the cavernous county boardroom from the back and see the walls to the left and right of me lined with dozens of uniformed police who are standing. Many seated are also in uniform. I feel I don’t really belong here. I search for an empty seat that I can take without disrupting anyone, and spot one on the aisle five rows from the front. I dip quickly into it, relieved that I haven’t had to ask someone to stand so that I can get by. As I settle in I look around at the two-hundred bodies to try to locate any faces I may know, and recognize three. I shudder at the sight of a truly enormous german shepherd laying in the aisle between me and the stage, tethered to a leash held by a man in row three. I presume the dog is part of a K-9 unit, but it’s unclear to me why a type of dog that is trained to maim people - and as research shows is disproportionately deployed on people of color - needs to be here.

I snap to attention. The pastor completes his invocation. The congresswoman gives her remarks. The judge rises to swear in the new sheriff. The lady seated next to me beams from behind her phone as she videos what is being said at the podium. She pans her camera across the crowd and I duck my head so she can get a clearer view. She is here for the pomp and the circumstance. All I can think of is Tyre. My mind drifts.

Does this lady think of Tyre?

Do these people lining the walls think of Black lives? Do their memories of Tyre, Oscar, Eric, Michael, Philando, Tamir, George, Breonna, and Rodney King, lurk in their body, like my memories lurk in mine?

Where do they hold their pain over these reputational hits to their profession?

How hard do they toil on the inside to try to ensure that this brutality stops?

_____

All of this goes to say that I get a pleasant surprise when the new Sheriff Bob Jonsen steps to the podium and begins telling us his story. He speaks about developing a practice in mindfulness and compassion, and teaching others. He references mental health. He says we should give incarcerated people “the opportunity to graduate from incarceration rather than just being released back into an environment which may invite recidivism.” Sitting there, my body shoots me this unanticipated feeling of trust for our new sheriff, and I have to admit to myself that I did not expect to feel this kind of thing here, which I further admit reflects my conditioning and my assumptions. As I sit in this unfamiliar space and listen, I feel lifted. I feel the new sheriff is someone I could work with, if it came to that. I leave feeling glad that I was here for this.

But as I make my way out of the building, back to my car, and up the highway home, it strikes me that not one person with the privilege of the podium tonight even mentioned the word ‘race,’ or the need of law enforcement to do better when it comes to policing black and brown bodies. Not the pastor. Not the congresswoman. Not the sheriff. People danced around the issue but nothing was actually said. The same thing happened when my city swore in a new police chief this past fall. I don’t know how you can commit to facing a systemic injustice if you won’t even speak its name.

As I turn off my car and walk up the path to my front door, I flash back to high school, to the fact of a german shepherd owned by a friend’s family, which was such an awful dog that it was never allowed off its leash. I remember a time when I was walking up the path to that friend’s front door, and their german shepherd lunged at me. I remember feeling so scared that I jumped backward in fright. I remember my friend’s father witness the whole thing and burst into uncontrollable laughter. I recall how today in the cavernous boardroom for the swearing in, the german shepherd in the aisle seemed largely non-plussed throughout the entire proceedings, yet lifted its head, stared, and wrinkled its eyebrows with curiosity as a brown-skinned person walked past and dipped into a seat in front of me.

It is hard to unseat your feelings when they live so deeply inside of you.

_____

I commend President Biden for speaking of race and law enforcement just last night, during his State of the Union address. A link to his speech is in the notes at the end, but I was most moved when he said:

We all want the same thing.

Neighborhoods free of violence.

Law enforcement who earns the community’s trust. Just as every cop when they pin on that badge in the morning has a right to be able to go home at night, so does everybody else out there. Our children have a right to come home safely.

I was driving to Walgreens and caught the speech on my car radio and I burst into a smile and banged my steering wheel with my fist as applause crept through me.

So, here’s to more mindfulness, Sheriff Jonsen, yes, and more compassion, yes, and more opportunities for law enforcement to earn the trust of the community they are sworn to serve, yes, and also to rooting out the racism and other biases within law enforcement which mean that some civilians are unjustly trampled upon.

And welcome.

____

How do you personally feel in the presence of police? How do your identity and/or life circumstance impact these feelings? What is the relationship in your city or town between law enforcement and people like you? What if anything do you wish was different? How do you need to grow and change? How do they?

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📰 Because my local newspaper, The Daily Post, sometimes quotes me out of context, I am stating this for them: I’m not anti-cop; I’m anti cops taking unarmed people’s lives and I want the profession to do better.

🇺🇸 The full text of President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7 is here. Search “Tyre” for his beautiful exhortation for law enforcement to do better.

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