The cops came to our door last year.
Something happened about a year ago. Without giving too many details about my neighbors, because I don’t really know one of them and the other is super nice and friendly, and I don’t really know what exactly happened or what was going on, nor would I want to share, but the cops were called.
Instead of going to my neighbor’s door, the police came to ours.
So, it’s like 2–3 am and I sort of hear a sound. I was soo asleep that I didn’t recognize it… like I think that I thought I was dreaming, but then I heard it again. I remember feeling annoyed. I thought it might be knocking but part of me wanted to ignore it because it was soo late and I initially thought that maybe it was one of the guys (our brothers) or I hoped that maybe they’d hear it first and they’d get up to open the door. Begrudgingly, I woke up and Tony (my husband) was kind of waking up too, we weren’t 100% sure what was going on. Since Tony and I have to wake up at 5–6 in the morning each day, waking up at night is super annoying. We sighed and really really didn’t want to get up to check but like, we knew that we needed to acknowledge it because if the guys were upstairs, they probably couldn’t hear the door …and then, we saw lights flash into our room through our closet window, which is right next to the front door but separated by a wall.
Tony was the one that processed that someone was trying to look inside. We got out of bed quickly and crept toward our doorway to the hall. I remember that Tony was in front of me and he could see from the window on the door that it was the police or that it looked like police and I remember that MY instinct was to walk right in front of the door and try to look too but Tony stopped me. He shushed me. I remember feeling annoyed at him because I’m thinking… “well, if someones at the door, we have to go open it… right?”
Also, because I’m too short, I couldn’t see well and so I wanted to at least go stand on the stairway to see the people at the door. Tony didn’t let me. I kept trying to talk and ask Tony if we were going to open the door and he kept shushing me and telling me to wait. I, like, felt confused… then, when we could tell that they had left the door and I felt relieved like… “it’s over” and “oh well”… we saw lights flashing into our bedroom from the other side of the house and we realized they were still trying to look inside.
I kinda felt scared at this point because…this was right around the time that the BLM protests were happening and we knew the story of Breonna Taylor…police brutality was /again/ being discussed constantly on my timeline. My immediate feeling then was like… “I’m in the wrong here”, “we just make a mistake by not opening the door”, “did we do something wrong?”.
I sort of rebelled and pulled away from Tony and walked up the stairs to see if anyone was at the door and Tony was whisper yelling at me to come back. I was shaking my head, I couldn’t see anyone at the door anymore. We then walked towards our kitchen and noticed the lights in there too but that window was wide open so we crept up to it so they couldn’t see us. Tony then saw that one of our neighbors was in the yard and walking towards his door and it looked like the police had noticed and were going to go talk to them. So Tony gestured us to go back to the room.
We went back to bed.
It was late and if we didn’t try to fall back asleep soon we knew we’d be super tired the next morning. We didn’t take time to process. The next day the guys said that they had heard an altercation from their side of the house earlier in the night and we all just reasoned that the cops must have just come to the wrong place.
It’s been a year and I still think about this. I even talked to my therapist about it later on that week to process how I was feeling.
I think I mostly got scared the day after because I was thinking…had I opened the door…I didn’t know what was happening so I don’t think that I would have had the words to explain that they’re just at the wrong place. I also thought about how that the guys have this damn habit of buying swords and knives (they’re anime nerds) and placing them all over the house and Tony likes to keep a bat close “just in case”. I had told him many times before this night that it doesn’t make me feel safer to have any kind of weapon in the house because…” what if that just gives an intruder an extra weapon?” but this time I was thinking… if the police noticed a bat or a sword, and because they were under the assumption that there was a domestic situation taking place, could they have acted as if Tony was armed? and what if they didn’t believe me if I said nothing was going on? I mean, wouldn’t a domestically disputing couple lie to the cops being called on them? …would the police feel like they need to enter our home?… what if I didn’t listen to Tony and I did what I felt was right at the moment? what if I got emotional, would they listen to me? this is MY home, do I have a right to not open the door?
I have a weird view towards the police because, while I understand all the movements that go against them…I for the most part haven’t had many overtly negative experiences with police. I have always done what I was taught to do and acted how I’m “supposed” to. Now… I have had a lot of interactions with police but I mostly just left every situation with relief like… “it’s over”… “everything is okay”…or “it’s not worse... it’s not ICE”…
As an immigrant, we’re not so much taught to be afraid of cops as much as we are taught to be very careful around cops….like, they aren’t as bad as /LA MIGRA/ but dealing with them in the “wrong” way could lead to having to deal with immigration….so we avoid cops…we pull over and wait on the side of the road until we can no longer see the police car near us….we pull into houses that aren’t ours to avoid being tailed….we don’t speed, we don’t look at them, we don’t call 911, we don’t interact in any way and we stay…safe.
I wasn’t so much taught that dealing with cops could mean I could die…we were more taught that dealing with cops incorrectly could mean that we would be taken away… like when a cop came to my door when I was a teen and told me they were taking my dad away…in that interaction, I didn’t FEEL anything, I just fixed my face, responded politely, translated, tried to retain as much info as I could, I gave the information I was trained to give… I did what I was “supposed” to do. The cop was friendly as he took my dad. I didn’t spend much time thinking about the policeman.
Tony once wanted to be a policeman, he even signed up for schooling. I spent time reconciling with my negative views towards the profession…I’d joke about playing “F The Police” if he ever had a bbq with his future peers…one of the funnest teachers I had was also an instructor at the academy…I have friends who have family members that are cops and I know people that work in related fields with cops… for the most part…a LOT of people around me fall into the #BlueLivesMatter ideology…so I’m used to always being the odd one out ideologically. I know the numbers, I’ve seen the videos, I read about abolition and defunding, and my family members have dark skin, we’re immigrants…
I KNOW it’s not a simple dichotomy.
I remember that we spent a year afraid of being deported, while my dad dealt with court stuff, after that policeman pulled my dad over because he had forgotten to turn his lights back on after getting gas a block away from our house, it was still light out when I had to translate for him outside my house. I was 15. When I was 7 police came to the rescue when my mom finally called 911 for help and that was the night we would finally leave home but then they left us outside the apartment building, alone, less than 20 feet from the violent person my mom had just called about. We had to walk several blocks to get a ride to a shelter. A policeman assumed I was illegal when I got in trouble in high school. Another police helped me file an assault charge when I was 17. Tony used to walk right up to police cars in high school and ask questions about the academy and I remember a nice and friendly policeman taught my DARE class in 5th grade. The police in Mexico are known for extortion and bribery…I often have to assuage my mom that things here in the U.S.A. aren’t as bad as the news makes it seem…it’s not like it’s Mexico…
But last year, when this happened, I got scared… and I didn’t really feel like I could talk to anyone about it. I didn’t want to post about it, not even jokingly like “Jaja, guess what mortified me last night”. Sharing an organization’s post or an influencer’s quote about police brutality statistics I can do anytime but sharing that I PERSONALLY felt scared…that felt less safe… lest I be one of the infamous media-controlled fearmongers…
But here’s the thing…I hear my neighbors every now and then and I can’t ignore them…I don’t go back to sleep, I lay there and rehearse what I’d say to the police if they came to the wrong door. I printed out the 4th amendment and taped it to my front door. I try so hard to quickly scroll past videos and images of the latest police shootings and I try my hardest to ignore the thoughts that tell me just how much my brother looks like the latest kid that was murdered. I reasoned away that time a cop tailed me and then parked around the corner from where I park to pick up Tony from work, I remember debating getting out of the car and switching seats to make Tony drive home and thinking about how unreasonable I was being. One day I scraped my bumper exiting my driveway because when I noticed there were 3 cops across the street, I tried to make sure I was driving slowly and inconspicuously … instead, they turned around to look at me and I shook the entire rest of my drive. I try to ignore the complaints on the Grey’s Anatomy groups from people who think that the latest episodes are “too political” and I unfollow people that go out of their way to goad “liberals”… I constantly search for new ways, new posts, better arguments, better resources to get people to just /GET IT/.
It’s been a year and like…everyone is tired, everything that could be said has been said….people with much much worse stories have shared and shared…their trauma has been consumed vigorously. I don’t know if choosing to share this story matters but I know that it FEELS like people are CHOOSING not to get it.
I’m glad Tony eventually CHOSE not to become a cop. I’ve seen many policemen, this year, CHOOSE to share their stories and take a stance against the system….as I said, it’s not a simple dichotomy, I KNOW there are layers to the issue, and it’s not as simple as CHOOSING to be for or against The Police or as trite as CHOOSING to post a clever hashtag.
I also KNOW that people shouldn’t be feeling like THIS and they definitely DON’T choose to.
The balance really shouldn’t be tipping so far to one side.
