The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler Read Free Book Online Page A

search. “There ain’t nothin’ in there, man,” said the driver. “Let’s just get it done,” said Neill. They did and found nothing. They are careful to say they want to “search,” not “check,” to be sure the consent is clear and legal.
    “We’ve got a guy walking to the front of the building,” Neill said into his radio. The jump-outs surrounded him, put his hands up against an iron fence, frisked him, and found nothing. Through the darkness I could not see any reasonable suspicion. As an officer swept the ground with the beam of his flashlight, however, he discovered a black plastic bag of weed packaged in tiny ziplock bags. The officers made no arrest; there was no proof connecting the man to the marijuana, and besides, the Power Shift was looking for guns.
    A lone man sat behind the wheel of a parked car. “Any drugs or guns in the car?” Neill asked affably. “How was your day?” They got him out, searched him, and seated him on the ground. LeFande had him stretch his legs out straight so he couldn’t run, at least not without sending an obvious warning by pulling up his knees before jumping to his feet. The officers searched his car (if he gave consent, I didn’t hear it) and found no weapons, but a sack full of packing materials presumably used for ten-dollar bags of crack—not enough for an arrest.
    Down the block, another driver, alone in a parked car, got Neill’s attention.“Any guns or drugs in the car tonight?” Neill asked in a bantering tone. LeFande had the driver sit on the curb behind the car while the officers searched the trunk, which had only a few jackets and a toolbox. Once, Neill recalled, he’d looked in a trunk and found a safe.
    At Sixteenth and C Streets SE, he spotted a couple walking. “Wha’s up?” he said in his best ghetto accent. The man pulled up his shirt and answered, “No guns, no guns.” Neill patted him down and remarked afterward, “If you talk to ’em good and don’t violate ’em too hard, they all right.”
    After eighteen frisks and seventeen vehicle searches, no guns had turned up, just a few telltale signs of the drug trade, probably not much different from what Neill’s squad would find on a college campus. The only difference would be the explosive uproar from congressmen and bankers and judges if their children were patted down by a police squad roaming late at night among the hallowed walkways and quads of, say, Princeton or Harvard. Of course, to cite Neill’s argument, those kids wouldn’t be carrying guns around. In Southeast D.C., the nineteenth man of the night was doing just that.
    Neill figured it out before I realized that anything was amiss. Traveling the streets with him reminded me of going through Sinai with a Bedouin who notices what the newcomer never sees, or of journeying in Lebanon with an old soldier whose instincts are remarkably alert, or in Vietnam with a local interpreter whose eye is keen and ear attuned to nuance and danger. That didn’t make Neill a hero, just a specialist, and it certainly didn’t make him always right; he had been wrong eighteen times so far tonight. But he was well accustomed to watching in a way that laymen never do.
    So I noticed nothing when a white Ford SUV slowed toward the end of the block and pulled over to park, and when the driver, a lean black man of about forty, got out and walked across the street in front of us and back our way down the sidewalk on the opposite side. To my eyes, he didn’t seem in a rush. He lit a cigarette and strode purposefully but not hastily.
    To Neill, however, he seemed too much in a hurry to get away from his car.
    “Hey, sir, what’s up?” Neill asked cheerfully. The man turned and stopped. “This your car?” The back side and rear windows were very dark, and Neill said something about illegal tint. It was done in the factory, the driver protested, and walked back to his SUV. Other officers arrived.Through the windshield, Neill could see a cup in