The Cop: A Free Story from Seven Years Running

Today I’m sharing a story which will appear in fuller form in our upcoming book, Seven Years Running. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Enjoy!

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Rosy and I pushed our bikes to the back of the garage and slammed them against the wall. Once again, our father had tried to ruin our lives.

We stomped into the hallway toward our bedroom, and Rosy halted.

“I don’t want to be here when he gets back,” she said.

“Me neither,” I agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

He walked in as we came up the stairs leading to the front door. My heartbeat raced, and I held my breath, but I tightened my fists in determination and kept moving. We had to get out of the house, away from him.

“You’re grounded.” He spoke in a scathing tone, his eyes cold. “If you keep walking, you’ll be in deeper trouble. Go to your room.”

Would he hit us? Would he grab us, twist our arms behind our backs, force us down the stairs, and throw us into our room? He had done it to Rosy before, and I half expected him to do it again, but he let us go without another word. Once the door closed behind us, Rosy and I looked at each other and exhaled.

“We have no privacy,” Rosy said as we walked down the street toward the playground at the elementary school. “He reads our mail and private journals, records our phone calls… Mama should never have gone to jail. He’s the one that should be in jail! And now that she’s finally free and we can have unsupervised visits, he still won’t let us have a private conversation with her even on a public phone.” Her face tightened and flushed red.

“I know,” I sighed. “He never rests unless he has complete control.” He recorded every call from the house, but we had come up with a way to have private phone conversations. We used the public phone at the convenience store. This time, however, he had followed us to the store and picked up the phone when it rang.

We plopped onto the swings. “Can you believe he bragged to Mama about hitting you?” I said, kicking at the dirt under my swing. “I mean the guardian ad litem has told him at least twice not to hit you, but he slaps you across the face and boasts about it! ‘I just hit your daughter,’” I mimicked, holding my hand up to my face as if it were a phone. “He knows he can get away with it.”

Rosy huffed and shook her head. “I just wanted to talk to Mama and tell her I love her and get my mind off of everything here. I miss her. Why can’t he leave us alone?”

“You sure got him good with that cup of Pepsi, though,” I said. I chuckled at the memory. After she had picked up a half-empty cup of soda from the sidewalk and hurled it at him, he had finally released Rosy’s bike handlebars and we rode away.

“I can’t wait for our next visit with Mama,” said Rosy. “I wish we could move back with her now instead of waiting for another 35 days.”

I nodded and took a deep breath. “We’d better go on back,” I said. We would have to face him again sooner or later, anyway.

Rosy’s shoulders drooped, and she sighed, releasing a long exhale.

“Come on.”

We trudged across the playground and up the street.

A motor hummed, and I looked up as a police car rounded the corner, heading toward us. My heartbeat kicked up. Adrenaline surged in my veins. Even though we were no longer fugitives, I instinctively turned my face away so he would not be able to identify me. The sight of cops always first made me want to jump behind a building, dumpster, tree…anything. Microseconds later, logic would take over and tell me to act as casual as possible. They mustn’t suspect anything. I heard the car approach and stop beside us. I forced myself to turn back toward the car and see what was happening.

The police car door opened. An officer got out, and stood in front of us, his feet spread in a wide stance, hands on his hips. He looked down at us. What is going on?

“Which one of you is Rosy?” he asked.

I pointed to Rosy, trying to imagine what this officer could want with her. Rosy raised her hand.

“You’re under arrest,” the officer told her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around, cuffing her hands behind her back.

My mouth dropped open. “For what?” I asked him.

“Assault.”

“But he hit her,” I said. My muscles quivered. I clenched my jaw. Is this a dream? A nightmare?

“That was self-defense.”

I could barely believe what I was hearing. Heat flushed through my already-hot body. Really? A strong, wiry man, hits his 14-year-old daughter…in self-defense…for assault? My mind reeled. I struggled for words.

“She was trying to get him to let go of her bike handlebars and he slapped her across the face! Hard! She barely turned fourteen last month. You-you can’t do that!” I said.

“Yes I can,” he smirked. “I am a police officer.”

“But—but you can’t do that!” I stammered. Why can’t I reason with him? Why can’t I make him understand? Certainly you can’t arrest a child simply because you’re a police officer…can you?

“Do you want me to arrest you, too?” he asked.

I weighed my options. I did not relish having an arrest record when I hadn’t even turned 16 yet. The thought of going into the police station or a juvenile detention center scared me. What would they do to me? I swallowed hard. My sister was even younger. I couldn’t let them take her away alone. If he arrested both of us, at least we might be together. We’d been through everything together, and I wouldn’t abandon her.

I put my wrists together and offered them to him for the handcuffs. “Sure,” I said.

The officer glared at me. “No,” he said. “You walk home.”

Rosy looked at me with her big brown eyes as he pushed her into the back seat of his cruiser and closed the door. She gave a half-hearted shrug. The cop leaned into the driver’s seat, at ease and in control.

I watched the car pull away. Confusion and sadness rushed in to join my fury, and I sank down onto the sidewalk. Tears streamed out of my eyes and down my nose, dripping onto the hot concrete and vanishing seconds later, taking my energy with them. Why? Why does this have to be so unjust?

I sat for a long while, the summer sun beating down on my head as the heat rose from beneath me. After I could no longer take the heat, I pushed myself back onto my feet and shuffled back toward the house.

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Here in the United States, and in several other countries around the world, we have collectively been taking a closer look at the role of police in society. (At the time of my writing this, it has been a little over a month since a cop murdered George Floyd, which is just one incident among many other examples of police brutality against people of color.)

A couple of weeks ago I read the excellent article, Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop, on Medium. A lot of what he said in that article hit home and brought back memories of my own experiences with police, the majority of which have been negative. The story above is one example.

We partially retold another encounter in our free book excerpt which you can get HERE. The excerpt stops short of the part where the cops actually became violent with my mom, who is a little 5’2” lady, but the whole story will be in the book.

As teenagers, we had several other negative police encounters, which will also be in our book. Some were instances where we called for protection and did not receive it. Other times, as in the story above, the police were called on us for no good reason and sided against us.

If I, as a “non-threatening” young white girl, have experienced some of these things, I can only imagine how these kinds of experiences must be multiplied many times over in both frequency and intensity when cops are dealing with a person from any group of which they have a limited understanding and excessive pre-programmed fear or hate. We’ve all heard the stories, and because I have personally observed what cops are capable of, I am inclined to believe them.

I don’t know what it is like to be a person of color, but I can fully relate to feeling fear–not safety–every time I see a cop.

I know what a lot of people might be thinking at this point. “But they’re not all bad! There are just some bad apples!”

As an adult, my experiences with cops have been mixed. A couple of times they have been helpful. A couple of times they have been jackasses. I have a couple of friends who are police officers, including one who even lived with my family for a few months, renting a room in our house while taking classes at the same university where I was a student. I worked out with him every morning at the university gym before we went off to our classes. I babysat his kids. He is still a cop, 20+ years later, and I believe he is a good man.

So yes, I realize cops do a lot of good things. However, I also know the system is broken. If you haven’t read Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop, please do so. I can attest that many of the things he says in that article, I have witnessed myself. He’s not making it up. It’s some serious food for thought and makes me wonder what could be possible if we totally dismantled the existing system and built something very different.

By the way, somebody shared a great resource with me and I’ve been going through it. If you’re like me and want to do something, but don’t know what to do, antiracismforbeginners.com is a good starting point. I’ve been working hard to educate myself, reading, listening to podcasts, and watching films on this whole topic.

I don’t have the answers but I hope you’ll join me in the continued journey to figure out how to make a difference when it comes to matters of peace and justice in the world.