On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman Read Free Book Online Page B

disappointment.
    Anthony’s running caused the other officer to put the two young men still standing
     there up against the car, search them, and run their names; luckily, they came back
     clean. Then two more cop cars came up the alley, sirens on. About five minutes after
     they finished searching the young men, one of the guys got a text from a friend up
     the street. He silently handed me the phone so I could read it:
    Anthony just got booked. They beat the shit out of him
.
    At the time of this incident, Chuck had recently begun allowing Anthony to sleep in
     the basement of his mother’s house, on the floor next to his bed. So it was Chuck’s
     house that Anthony phoned first from the police station. Miss Linda picked up and
     began yelling at him immediately.
    “You fucking stupid, Anthony! Nobody bothering you, nobody looking at you. What the
     fuck did you run for? You a nut. You a fucking nut. You deserve to get locked up.
     Dumb-ass nigga. Call your sister, don’t call my phone. And when you come home, you
     can find somewhere else to stay.”
    .   .   .
    When the techniques young men deploy to avoid the police fail, and they find themselves
     cuffed against a wall or cornered in an alleyway, all is not lost: once caught, sometimes
     they practice concerted silence, create a distraction, advocate for their rights,
     or threaten to sue the police or go to the newspapers. I occasionally saw each of
     these measures dissuade the police from continuing to search a man or question a man
     on the street. When young men are taken in, they sometimes use the grate in the holding
     cell at the police station to scrape their fingertips down past the first few layers
     of skin, so that the police can’t obtainthe prints necessary to identify them and attach them to their already pending legal
     matters. On four separate occasions I saw men from 6th Street released with bloody
     fingertips.
    AVOIDING THE POLICE AND THE COURTS WHEN SETTLING DISPUTES
    It’s not enough to run and hide when the police approach. A man intent on staying
     out of jail cannot call the police when harmed, or make use of the courts to settle
     disputes. He must forego the use of the police and the courts when he is threatened
     or in danger and find alternative ways to protect himself. When Mike returned from
     a year upstate, he was rusty in these sensibilities, having been living most recently
     as an inmate rather than as a fugitive. His friends wasted no time in reacquainting
     him with the precariousness of life on the outside.
    Mike had been released on parole to a halfway house, which he had to return to every
     day before curfew. When his mother went on vacation, he invited a man he had befriended
     in prison to her house to play video games. The next day, Mike, Chuck, and I went
     back to the house and found Mike’s mother’s stereo, DVD player, and two TVs gone.
     Later, a neighbor told Mike that he had seen the man taking these things from the
     house in the early morning.
    Once the neighbor identified the thief, Mike debated whether to call the police. He
     didn’t want to let the robbery go, but he also didn’t want to take matters into his
     own hands and risk violating his parole. Finally, he called the police and gave them
     a description of the man. When we returned to the block, Reggie and another friend
     admonished Mike about the risks he had taken:
    REGGIE: And you on parole! You done got home like a day ago! Why the fuck you calling
     the law for? You lucky they ain’t just grab [arrest] both of you.
    FRIEND: Put it this way: they ain’t come grab you like you ain’t violate shit, they
     ain’t find no other jawns [warrants] in the computer. Dude ain’t pop no fly shit [accused
     Mike of some crime in an attempt to reduce his own charges], but simple fact is you
     filed a statement, you know what I’m saying, gave them niggas your government [real
     name]. Now theygot your mom’s address in the file as your