My brother counted it. He came to seven. Seven times he was stopped by police officers in the past two years. Routine check, they added every time. I thought that was a funny idea, that routine, because I’ve been driving a car myself for almost twenty years and I’ve never been stopped for a check. Very funny too, how we laughed at him in the family every time when the time came again. He’s got quite a crook face, we said to each other, so it’s not very surprising that cops think he’s got something up his sleeve. My brother laughed along every time, because he didn’t worry too much about it. He is, after all, a big good guy. A giant of a boy, almost six feet tall, with three small children and no interest in anything but family life.
He doesn’t drink, so every time he has to blow his breath during such a so-called routine check, the officers catch a bone. He also doesn’t care about looks like expensive cars or clothes, so the boring bourgeois (sorry) he drives doesn’t give rise to an arrest either. He is averse to all forms of affectation, loves nature (especially the Surinamese) and drives at ease from A to B in that perfectly normal car with child seats in the back and a trunk full of football equipment and diaper bags. And yet: arrested seven times.
Every time he asks the same question when he is arrested: why? What am I doing wrong? Because a crook’s face or not, his appearance alone can never be sufficient reason to arrest someone, can it? On the website of the police it is called ‘proactive checking’. Officers may arrest someone on their own initiative if they detect deviant or suspicious behaviour. They do this on the basis of ‘experience and professional intuition’. Intuition that they must be able to substantiate objectively, that is also stated there. And my little brother asks about that every time, about that so-called objective substantiation. Seven times he asked, and seven times it was answered with haughty silence.
The seventh time it had happened, it had been a day off. The street was busy with families walking in a winter sun. The people stopped to see what was happening. Sitting in the car as the cop went through his papers, he’d been embarrassed for things he hadn’t done. Felt humiliated by the looks of others. Because of the assumptions that were implied in it. His two youngest children were in the backseat and panicked. They asked him what was the matter, that question over and over again; “What have you done, papa?” Frustrated by the fear in their voices, he begged the officer to explain to him what he was doing wrong, what it was about his behavior that made him suspicious. “Do those children have reason to be afraid of the police?” was the response he got. The children then burst into tears.
He didn’t get answers to his questions, just like every other time he’d asked them.
Maybe the ‘professional intuition’ of the average police officer doesn’t explain itself very well, but we’ve been laughed at, crookedness or not. When my little brother told me this story, his children were there. They crawled into his lap, silent and wide-eyed, still in awe of what had happened that week. He didn’t hold back anymore either: his story was angry and unfiltered. The suspicion with which this officer had also viewed him, his arrogant refusal to answer his questions, had made something inside him snap. “I remembered his face,” he said. And; “He can pray that he doesn’t run into me on the street without a uniform.”
The children were silent. That’s how it is, I realized. This is how you turn a good guy into a danger. And that is how you install distrust towards an institution that should instill trust. And so even the most benevolent of people dies of laughter, eventually.
Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 7, 2023