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Shortly before 11 p.m., on or about May 18, 1989, a white police officer stopped my younger brother Michael and I just minutes from our home. He flashed his lights, got out of his police car and asked where we had come from. I pointed to the trolley stopped at the light.
"Could you guys hold on a second," he said in a friendly, but firm, manner. "There's been an armed robbery."
I said something along the lines of, "What does that have to do with us?" A few minutes before, on the trolley, we had been carefree, laughing and joking. We were suddenly being questioned as people stared at use.
The police officer, apologetically, explained that the two black males who committed the robbery had been armed with an axe, so he might need to search our bags. It got more serious when another police car pulled up, its red light whirling. There were several inaudible words over the officer's walkie-talkie, then we heard the words that would set us free: "Dark-skin blacks." At the same time, my brother and I simultaneously showed him our arms.
The officer apologized, we were free to go. As we rounded the next corner towards home, he saw us again; he smiled and waved. We were in affluent Brookline, so things could have been different if we had been in poor and predominately black Roxbury, Dorchester or Mattapan.
And what would have happened if we had matched the description? We would have been taken to the scene of the crime, our fates in the hands of an angry stranger. That side of me ― police stopped me several times when I was in the U.S. ― somewhat identifies with Michael Brown, the black teenager that police officer Darren Wilson shot dead in August.
Unlike Brown, I always respond politely in dealing with police in the U.S., so I still cannot completely identify with him. Regardless of what my pocket Constitution-carrying friends say, I prefer to deal with police officers in court rather than on the street.
But another side of me can understand the challenges for police working in the slow-motion riots that are America's high-crime areas.
Several years ago, I joined a police officer as he walked the beat in a dangerous part of Washington, D.C. He explained that when he tries the "gentlemen, aren't you aware that loitering isn't allowed in front of this store" approach, people ignore him. He said that as an Asian policeman in a black neighborhood, he had to be a bit tougher. Being a "bad cop" at the beginning of interactions kept situations from getting worse.
Is there a middle ground between sympathy for folks like Brown and understanding the challenge that armed agents of the state like Wilson face?
So many of the responses to Ferguson highlight one side of the incident, with some seeing only a dead teen gunned down as proof of America's evil. Some of them rioted and looted, but many more have held peaceful vigils in Brown's honor (although, in the last 15 minutes of his life, Brown robbed a store and tussled with a cop). Others only see the side of a cop having to make a split-second decision that could cost his life if he is wrong, and defended Wilson even before seeing the conflicting witness accounts.
Those conflicting witness accounts ― called the "Rashomon effect"― reminded me of the book "We Are All Multiculturalists" by Nathan Glazer, my former adviser at Harvard. He noted that the problem with the "truth" in history was that people focused on different parts. Did the U.S. engage in slavery and annihilate Indians? Certainly, and critics who point that out are correct. Has the U.S. led the fight for freedom in history? Yes, that is true, too. But the two (or three, or more) sides talk past one another, highlighting the "truth" of their slice of history, just as so many have done about the Wilson-Brown confrontation.
The Michael Brown criminal case is over; Darren Wilson has resigned from his police job. Between Aug. 9, when Brown was killed, and Nov. 24, when the grand jury reached its decision, about 1,700 whites and about 1,800 blacks were killed (blacks at a much higher rate, based on the U.S. population) based on 2011 averages. It is easier to argue about a case like the one in Ferguson than to figure out what to do about the many homicides.
I am now back in South Korea, where civilians scream at cops without the threat of being gunned down. The only time an officer has stopped me in South Korea was when he wanted to chat about his time living in the U.S.
The writer is director for international relations at Freedom Factory Co. in Seoul, and Asia Outreach Fellow with the Atlas Network in Washington, D.C. He can be reached atCJL@post.harvard.edu.
