“Oh absolutely, I promise,” says the police officer in my local park. It’s my coffee walk on a beautiful sunny morning, about a quarter-mile from ritzy South Coast Plaza mall, and she’s in a pickup truck parked on the grass. Another female officer in another truck is parked across the concrete walking path 12 feet away.
I’ve just spent 15 minutes talking with her about why she’s there (“to look into things, you know, with South Coast Plaza”), what she thinks about George Floyd (“that was terrible”), and whether there will be a curfew again tonight in our town (“it’s day by day, we may need a reason to arrest people if they’re not being safe”). I’m trying to connect personally and raise my concerns in a way that might land with her. She hasn’t commented on the fact that I’m not wearing a mask — because I was drinking my coffee — even though it’s illegal not to.
Finally I ask her, “May I ask for your personal promise, that if you see your fellow officers doing anything wrong tonight, to people or reporters, you’ll push back against that?”
And that’s when she promised. For what it’s worth. Maybe something? I don’t know.
Because she then went on to tell me, “We’re so watched over, there are so many safeguards. Like this, for instance” and she pulls out her bodycam. From her pocket.
“I should actually have turned it on when we started talking. I usually do. It’s saved me so many times, when people have said I did something I didn’t because they were angry about a ticket.”
But why didn’t she turn it on for me? I didn’t ask, though I should have; though the answer is obvious. Because a polite middle-aged smiley white woman like me is so clearly not a threat.
Not like George Floyd. Not like Ahmaud Arbery. Not like Sandra Bland.
Wishing peace and justice to all of us tonight. Yes, including my friendly non-body-cam-using officer. Hope she’ll keep her promise. What else should I have done? Advice welcome. I’m new at this. Didn’t even think to look for her name or badge number, just to know for future.
Black lives matter.