14. "Go ahead and step out of the car."

I wasn’t a particularly socially conscious person. I was pretty disengaged from most of what went on in the present tense, interested in little that was real-world-oriented.

When the Weinstein scandal broke, in October of 2017, I was going through articles about the Utah nurse. At that point I wasn’t focused on sexual harassment. Not anymore. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time—years. And it was decades since I’d seemed to detect it everywhere, in places no one else could see it, in movies, plays, and novels, in this opera and that Broadway musical. (What I was actually seeing, of course, was sex in the context of a power imbalance.) I no longer remembered the circumstances under which each of Ted Bundy’s victims had disappeared or even remembered any of their names. Not one. I’d had other obsessions, over the years, and gone through periods in which I researched some subject or topic to death, often for no particular reason.

That fall, though, for the first time in years, I was actually thinking of writing about something I was fixated on. The subject was police brutality—and lest anyone think me a particularly thoughtful or socially conscious person, I should say up front that I wasn’t. On the contrary, I was pretty disengaged from most of what went on in the present tense, interested in little that was real-world-oriented. But the previous winter, I had been bitten by a cat and, as a result, had chanced upon a phenomenon in popular culture that got my attention. I think now this was because it rhymed with something in my past. It was a particular aspect of the old reality show Cops. First, though, I have to explain about the cat.

It was my cat, my fault. She’d slipped past me out the side door of the house in rural New Hampshire that Bill and I had recently moved to, and she’d run into the barn. And since she’d only just been returned to us after months of being lost and wandering in the cold and snow, when I finally cornered and managed to lay hands on her, I’d hung on to her even though she was biting me pretty hard. Our barn is full of holes and passages that lead directly to the woods around our house, and I knew that if I let go of her the cat would disappear again. I didn’t think we could bear once more the agony of not knowing what had become of her, so all the way back to the house, even though it hurt like hell, I’d let the cat continue to bite me.

Cat bites are a serious matter, it turns out, owing partly to the shape of their teeth and partly to the fact that their mouths are really filthy. The physician’s assistant who examined my hand at Dartmouth-Hitchcock drew me a sketch of a razor-sharp tooth sinking into human flesh to illustrate why treating cat bites with Band-Aids and Bacitracin isn’t the smartest thing in the world.

I’d applied antibiotic ointment to the punctures and covered them up and had only thought to pay a visit to the doctor when my hand had blown up. And I’d only stopped by the local community hospital when a course of oral antibiotics hadn’t taken the swelling down and I’d found that I couldn’t move my wrist.

By the time we got to Dartmouth-Hitchcock, after an MRI and four consecutive days of intravenous antibiotics, I was really scared. So, when I was told that my hand should really have been in a splint all along, that moving it might cause the infection to spread, and that it would be a good idea to keep my arm immobile for a few days while we waited to see if this latest course of IV antibiotics had any effect, I took the advice to heart.

On a snowy day in mid-December, therefore, when I fell asleep to a Law & Order marathon and woke up to Cops, I didn’t change the channel. I’d been warned to keep my bad arm elevated and immobile, and I honestly thought the next stage in treatment might involve amputation. So, all that day and long into the night, unable to sleep for the dull throb in my hand, I was a captive audience to a parade of law enforcement personnel brutalizing and harassing people.

It was something I‘d never have watched in a million years under ordinary circumstances: a horrible, disgusting, stomach-turning spectacle. All the same, I wasn’t going to change the channel. Coleridge imprisoned in his lime-tree bower was not more committed to contemplating the creative force of nature than I was to not reaching for the remote. And little by little, in an odd, perverse way, the show began to fascinate me. 

I’d never heard of Cops. I may have been vaguely aware that if you circled the dial a couple of times you sometimes went past a show where a bunch of police officers seemed to be standing around talking in real time. But I wouldn’t have known what it was called or that it purported to follow members of various law enforcement agencies around on the job and document them at their work, cinema-verité style, or that it had been on the air for nearly 30 years and was considered one of the earliest examples of “reality television,” a term it predated—that’s how old it was.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time describing a television show everyone knows about, which was briefly taken off the air in the wake of the George Floyd protests and is now, once again, just as ubiquitous as ever.

What caught my attention were not the scenes of law enforcement personnel weighed down by pseudo-martial equipment, relentlessly persecuting the vulnerable and the marginalized through the suburbs and ghost towns of America. Nor was it even the segments in which police officers and sheriff’s deputies were shown assaulting people: throwing someone to the sidewalk for no reason; tasing someone who was already helpless on the ground; sticking their hand down someone’s throat while other cops forced the subject’s mouth open; sending attack dogs after some loiterer or jaywalker who had fled because they’d been approached in an aggressive or threatening manner. (In one segment a White cop followed a Black man into his home and tased him almost to the point of unconsciousness on his own living-room floor simply because he hadn’t thought he should have to identify himself while standing on his own front porch.)

What I found in the first instance eye-opening and then increasingly hard to believe was that people were willing to be seen doing this stuff on camera.

Ultimately, that was what had me galvanized and watching episodes of Cops long after my hand had begun to heal. What had struck me when I first began watching the show, though, had more to do with language.

On the surface, law enforcement officials in the rest of America appeared to be more polite and respectful than the New York cops I’d known most of my life. When they addressed people as “sir” and “ma’am,” the words didn’t seem like code for “asshole” and “fuck you.” All the same, there was something chilling about the way they addressed civilians. They hardly ever just told somebody to do something. It was rarely “Put your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them,” or “Step out of the car, please.” Nine times out of ten the instruction was accompanied by some conciliatory verbal gesture: “Do me a favor and…” or “Do such-and-such for me.”

Do me a favor and step out of the vehicle—as if you and the cop were friends, peers. Turn around for me, as though you had a relationship with each other. Go ahead and do such and such. That was my favorite because it implied that they were telling you to do something you’d been planning to do anyway. Go ahead and put your hands behind your back. Only the second you did what they were telling you to do, they were going to search your car without probable cause.

I couldn’t imagine a New York cop saying, Do me a favor and do anything or to do something for me. New York cops are far too arrogant. Their every posture and utterance signal contempt for the ordinary citizen. What began to occur to me, though, was that law enforcement officials out in real America didn’t have to hold themselves aloof from the public because they had developed a whole system of forced compliance based on the language of coercion.