As an immigrant from India, last
week’s incident in Madison, Alabama, in which police used unwarranted force on
an Indian man who indicated he didn’t understand English, is deeply disturbing.
This 57yr old grandfather had recently arrived in America to stay with his son
and daughter-in-law, to help care for their toddler. He walked in the
neighborhood, up and down the street where his son lived.
On February 6th, around 8
am and on his morning walk, Sureshbhai Patel aroused the suspicion of a
neighbor who called the police and requested that he be investigated.
There are two video recordings from
police car dash cams showing different angles of the incident, which help re-create what transpired.
The two officers who investigated this call were Officer Eric Parker and his trainee, Andrew Slaughter. When they arrived, Sureshbhai
Patel was walking at a brisk pace on the sidewalk along the houses. The
officers parked their patrol car and caught up to him:
Officer Eric Parker:
Hi Bud. Talk to you real quick. Come
here. What’s goin’ on sir?
Sureshbhai
Patel: (inaudible)
Officer Eric Parker:
You what? India? Your knee? You’re
doing what?
Come here. Where you headed?
Sureshbhai
Patel: (inaudible)
Officer Eric Parker:
Where? I can’t understand you sir.
Where’s your address? Where d’you
live?
(Mr. Patel
begins to walk away)
Officer Eric Parker:
Stop
walking. Stop walking. D’you have any ID on you?
No ID.
What’s your name?
Sureshbhai
Patel: (inaudible)
Trainee
Andrew Slaughter:
He’s sayin’
“No English.”
Sureshbhai
Patel: (inaudible)
Officer Eric Parker:
India? OK.
Do you live
here? Do you live in this neighborhood?
Where’s
your address? Where you goin’?
(Mr. Patel begins
to walk away again.)
Trainee
Andrew Slaughter:
Sir, sir.
Come here.
Officer Eric Parker:
We’re
tryin’ to figure this out. Are you lookin’ at houses and stuff?
Trainee Andrew Slaughter:
Stop. Do not jerk away from me
again.
If you do I’m gonna put you on the
ground.
Do not jerk away one more time. D’you
understand?
DO you
understand what I’m sayin’? Do not jerk away from me again.
Officer Eric Parker:
Relax.
Relax.
This is when the officers throw Mr.
Patel face-down on the ground, with nothing to break his fall because his hands
were held behind his back. He is patted down. Still in a prone position, he is
asked to uncross his legs. He doesn’t do it, and as the officers quickly find
out, it is not just because he doesn’t understand English. They hoist him up
and ask him to stand, but Mr. Patel’s legs dangle limply. The force of being
thrown down causes spinal injuries resulting in paralysis.
This incident has quite possibly
caused every Indian immigrant in America to wonder whether this atrocity could
have happened to his or her own parents. One subset of immigrants, I’m
guessing, might have dismissed their imagined versions of a police encounter
gone bad by reassuring themselves that their parents are immune to this kind of
a disastrous turn of events because their parents speak English. (Roughly, about
2% of India’s population is fluent in English and uses it as their primary
language).
While fluency in English will likely
have reduced the chances of a violent outcome with the police, the root of the
problem here is not a lack of communication. Blind use of force in the context
of a communication gap is the cause for this latest episode of unwarranted
violence by the police. If you reassured
yourself that your parents are immune, picture this:
In a hypothetical encounter with the
police, your English-speaking father or uncle, unskilled in the required
behavior of just-the-right-amount of subservience by people of color in the
presence of police, reaches for something in his pocket before a trigger-happy officer
launches a round of bullets through him.
Aside from the problem of overuse of
force by the police, there is the question of the neighbor – with whom this
whole fiasco begins. Is the role of the neighbor incidental or pivotal?
The neighbor’s “concern,” which is now
a bold euphemism for perpetuating racist stereotypes, is fueled by the Culture Of
Fear that inundates America. We are hyper-vigilant about our safety in ways
that run counter to common sense.
During the
police call, our Neighbor Of The Year begins:
“We’ve had a….He was doin’ it
yesterday, and today he’s just kinda wanderin’ around in driveways and now he’s
walking down Hardiman Place Lane towards Hardiman Road…
He’s kinda walkin’
around close to the garage and I stopped and started lookin’ at him and he
started walking down Hardiman Place Lane towards Hardiman Road…”
It doesn’t occur to NeighborOfTheYear
that if the same man was there “yesterday,” and again today, he might have good
reason to be there. Clearly, the color of his skin stole any possible
legitimacy to be in that neighborhood.
In an
ironic twist, when Chirag Patel, the son of Sureshbai Patel is interviewed, he
says: “This is a good neighborhood, so I didn’t expect anything to happen….”
So good,
that in the eyes of his Friendly Neighborhood Bigot, it is no place for a
colored man to be seen.
When the
police dispatcher asks American Neighbor to describe the man, he says:
“He’s a
skinny black guy, he’s got a toboggan on, he’s really skinny…..
And I don’t
…I’ve lived here for four years…I’ve never seen him before….”
As AmericanNeighbor points out, Mr.
Patel is very thin. Some media reports put him at 130-140 lbs. Hardly an
intimidating figure - further indicating that the tactics used to restrain him
and stop him from walking away were abusive.
AmericanNeighbor
mistakes Mr. Patel for an African American. Let’s be clear - there’s no crime
in that! But the hypothetical question remains unanswered of whether he would
have been just as concerned about the safety of his family had he identified
Mr. Patel as a person of color, but not African American.
And even though the officers who
responded to this call were expecting to encounter an African American man -
about 30 years of age according to AmericanNeighbor – they learn from the very beginning of their
interaction with Mr. Patel that he is from India and speaks no English. Their
use of force on Mr. Patel is not because they think he is black and are acting
on whatever prejudice that knowledge entails, as some media commentary seems to
indicate. They are well aware of Mr. Patel’s ethnicity when they slam him to
the ground.
If at all the police brought any additional prejudice into the fray, a possible candidate is - Disdain For
Those Who Don’t Speak English:
The initial investigation begins
with two officers. A third officer pulls up in his patrol car at the time when Mr.
Patel is brought down physically to the ground – that is why there are two police
video recordings with different vantage points. As the third officer approaches
and asks “Any Madison ID?,” the
investigating officer answers:
“I don’t know. He don’t speak a lick
of English.”
Whether this comment was just a
neutral piece of information being conveyed, or whether it carried undertones
of disdain, is open to interpretation. However, there is ample evidence all
around us, that there is much antipathy for those who don’t speak English in
America. The possibility that not being fluent in English degraded the status
of Mr. Patel in the eyes of the officers is one worth examining:
Even despite the color of his skin,
Mr. Patel possibly went from being someone with rights to a Person Of Inconsequence
simply because he didn’t speak English.
That there is hostility towards
those who do not assimilate linguistically when they live in America is most
apparent in people’s attitudes toward Hispanics, especially in border-states
with large Hispanic populations. But it is far from being just a border-state
phenomenon. A recent and amusing blog post in the Vermont Political Observer, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished,” illustrates
the point:
In brief: An eighth-grader and a
student of Latin in Vermont requested Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning to
introduce a bill to give Vermont a Latin motto in addition to the existing one
in English. Benning introduced the bill earlier this month. After a local news
channel covered this initiative by Benning, the news station received a barrage
of angry posts on their Facebook page “from ignorant Vermonters spewing their
hatred in barely readable fractured English. (Spelling and punctuation as-is)
Warning: Teh stoopid, it burns!”
A few unedited posts:
Chris
Ferro: “That’s a BIG NO, if you live in the United State YOU need to learn
ENGLISH!!”
Kurtis
Jones: “No cause vt ain’t no Latino area. Leave the motto alone”
Dorothy
Lynn Lepisto: “I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places
have American mottos?”
Norman
Flanders: “What next Arab motto??”
Kevin P.
Hahn: “How about ‘go back south of the boarder'”
Richard
Mason: “We are AMERICANS, not latins, why not come up with a Vermont motto that
is actually from us”
Ronald
Prouty Jr. “No way this is America not Mexico or Latin America. And they nee to
learn our language, just like if we go there they want us to speak theirs”
Heather
Chase: “Seriously?? Last time I checked..real vermonters were speakin ENGLISH..
NOT LATIN..good god…”
Phil
Salzano: “My question is, are we Latin, or are we Vermonters? Alright then,
English it is…..”
Julie
Kellner: “No, you a USA citizen!.. Learn & understand the language!!!.”
Kelley
Dawley: “How do you say idiotic senator in spanish? I’d settle for deport
illegals in spanish as a back up motto”
Linda
Murphy: “This is America! Not Mexico!”
Not knowing the difference between
Latin and Latin America is one thing. Not knowing about the heritage of the
English language vis-Ã -vis Latin,
is another, and all the more comical coming from people vehemently advocating
learning English! This incident in Vermont not only reveals a widely held
hostility to any deviation from English, but also betrays a deep ignorance of
American history.
If AmericanNeighbor began this relay
of prejudice based on the color of Mr. Patel’s skin, the officers carried the
baton further when they assumed that a lack of fluency in English is a sign
that the man they were dealing with was a Person of Insignificance. With these
preconceptions, they could never have imagined that Sureshbhai Patel belonged
in that neighborhood by virtue of his educated son, and that he now has a
community of support (Indian, American and international) behind him. Given Mr.
Patel’s obvious lack of understanding of what the police were asking him, they
could have followed him to see where he was headed. If they were aware (and
they ought to have been) of AmericanNeighbor’s observation that Mr. Patel was also
seen in the same neighborhood the day before, they had all the more reason to
constrain themselves and watch where their suspect was headed. If they had waited, they would have seen Mr.
Patel enter a residence not ten houses away from where they stood, and the
situation would have been resolved peacefully.
During the call to the police, AmericanNeighbor
follows Mr. Patel at a distance in his car. He describes:
“I’m just kinda followin’ him from a
distance….
I’m on my way to work but I’m
nervous leavin’ my wife and….
He’s just standing around in the driveway across
the street…..
He looked at me and started walking away so……. I’d like somebody
to talk to him.”
AmericanNeighbor exhibits classic
symptoms of our Fear Culture. It seems that an individual’s lack of familiarity
with passersby on a public street is now grounds for questioning safety. Anyone
daring to walk in residential neighborhoods in broad daylight better be
prepared for scrutiny, especially if they are people of color.
Our hyper-vigilance is manic. Children
no longer populate their neighborhood streets in much of America, the way they
did a generation ago. Children seen without an adult chaperone in residential
streets and public parks are targets of police investigations, and their
parents are attacked by the Predatory Wing of Child Protection Services. Instead
of looking out for your un-chaperoned children, AmericanNeighbor will call the
police. Under the pretense of “concern” for your children, AmericanNeighbor derives
great pleasure in bringing you down.
Within one generation we have
already managed to trigger tectonic shifts in our sense of security. We used to
derive our sense of well-being from intangible powers – from the feeling of
belonging to a community, and faith in that community. Now we have externalized
our sense of security into the purely tangible: It has transformed into the
ever-present devices that rule our lives – Cell phones. Security cameras. Electronically
monitored gates. And guns.
Hyper-vigilance has seeped into
every aspect of our lives. We examine everything through the lens of
safety. There is less crime in present
times than there was a few decades ago when today’s parents were growing up.
And technology has made it easier and quicker to communicate and get help when
true emergencies happen. Yet, we are increasingly afraid of daily, imagined
disasters.
The
proverbial Village Idiot has morphed into your Friendly Neighborhood Bigot. And
he has much in common with the American Sniper. He takes shots at you from the
sanctuary of his home. He fires at you
from the safety of distance, wielding a weapon we call 911.
