In the forty-eight years that I’ve been driving, I have been stopped four times. That’s less than once a decade.
The first, with our young kids in the back seat, was for a broken taillight for which we received an exceedingly polite warning: “Excuse me for bothering you, but did you know your taillight is out? You’ll probably want to get that taken care of.” It was in my neighborhood just about a mile and a half from where Philando Castile was killed.
The second ticket was for speeding in the same neighborhood. Again, the exchange was respectful and businesslike.
The third was in the diverse neighborhood of Frogtown, when I was giving a mother and her son a ride to a social services agency to file some paperwork. I was stopped right in front of the police station, ostensibly for not yielding to a pedestrian who had yet to step off the curb. The officer asked me if I was okay and gave all of us a good looking over. He added speeding to the ticket as an afterthought, though I had just turned a corner and was going, by my calculations, less than 30 miles an hour. I have always remarked to friends that the only time I’ve felt overly scrutinized and unfairly treated was when I had Black passengers in the car. But I didn’t say anything at the time. I paid the fine.
My fourth stop was again for a taillight, this time on the East Side, near Philando’s home. My fine was efficiently and politely waived at the courthouse when I provided proof that I’d had the bulb replaced.
When I heard this morning that Philando Castile has been stopped almost 50 times since 2006, often in the same neighborhoods where I drive without a second thought, and that he was paying back fines sometimes at a rate of up to $500 a month, my heart sank for the gazillionth time this week. I am running out of hope.
My despair comes from the sheer size, complexity, and depth of the problem, and from my own inadvertent complicity. The root causes are not solved simply by removing a few individual police officers who racially profile, though better training and accountability should be high up on the list. My discomfort lies in the fact that such racial profiling – whether or not I have admitted it exists or have condoned the practice - is done on my behalf.
I like my city to be safe. I pay my taxes gladly so that we have a professional police force to keep it that way. But if my safety and peace of mind comes at the expense of a young Black man who, for driving the same roads as I do, pays with his hard-earned cash and ultimately with his life, there is something seriously wrong with America and with me for not working harder to manifest a country and culture I can be proud of.
Castile's traffic stop record from NPR.