Formal Complaint: Police Should Not Be Used to Harass Pedestrians

I received a payment on a Friday. (Not last Friday. This complaint has been allowed to sit for a few weeks because it's a complaint about behavior that is not specific to one individual.) I wanted to pick up provisions for the weekend. Jane Doe, Joe Jones, and Jill Smith had already gone to the grocery store. John Roe wanted to go on Saturday. I did not particularly want to spend all day Saturday waiting on him. It was raining a little, but it wasn’t cold. So I started walking.

I had worn a pale beige London Fog overcoat. If it had been a human that overcoat would be old enough to vote by now. I had also worn a pair of pale beige fake leather shoes. If they had been humans those shoes would probably have been married with children by now. I thought the indestructible trench coat and the shoes that needed to be worn out and burned were a good choice to wear on a dark, wet night. The shoes gleamed almost white in the dark. I sometimes walk to the store in what I wore at work all day, which is often blue or black, but this evening for once I was at least wearing something nice and pale-colored for visibility.

As regular readers know, there’s not a great selection of grocery stores in Gate City, Virginia, since the young heir let the locally owned Thriftway store fail. (The young heir was in my class at school. Sometimes a town of active senior citizens is a weird place to be fifty.) There’s a Dollar Store. Some things Dollar Stores don’t sell are sold at Food Lion, but I’ve learned the hard way about the convenience of buying food at Food Lion. I don’t know what they spray in the store but even trusted brands in sealed packages have made me sick. So I buy some things in Weber City and some things in Kingsport. If anybody wants to revive the Thriftway store, count me in. Anyway I took the computer home for the weekend and parked it in the house, more than two miles, before heading back out to walk seven more miles.

So I walked out along Route 23.

Further along the route I had planned there is no alternative to walking on Route 23, but at that point there is a “business route” that runs parallel to the four-lane highway. “Don’t you find it safer than the highway?” people have asked me. For safe footing away from motor traffic, it has some good sections with real sidewalks and some bad ones with deep puddles and ditches, but on a Friday night, the main difference is that that “business route” leads past that drug treatment place where the drug crowd hang out. They are not local people. Gate City people are mostly related to me and their vices do not include beating up old ladies. About the druggies somebody got a grant to bring into one part of town, who knows? I definitely felt safer on the four-lane highway with only the wind behind me.

I was walking briskly along, thinking how nice it would be if Joan Brown were driving to Wal-Mart this evening, when a police car stopped.

It occurs to me that if the state trooper’s supervisor were listening to the conversation, the supervisor would have missed a very important part of the conversation. The trooper introduced himself by name, and my mind went off on one of those old-lady loops that form when people haven’t recognized an old childhood acquaintance on sight for a long time: "You do look just like one of my brother's classmates who had that family name. Is that who you are? But if that's who you are, why does your brother look more than eight or ten years older than you do? Are you an old acquaintance, or the son of one?" 

People who are fifty years old don’t say this kind of thing; I think the minimum age for saying it out loud is seventy-five.

It’s not, of course, the first time anyone’s ever called the police to report “a woman walking on the street who might be in some sort of distress, I was afraid to ask,” and it would be the first time if I hadn’t expressed my extreme disapproval of any police officer participating in this sort of thing.

If we want to reduce local warming and so on and so forth, the first thing we as a nation need to do is remind ourselves that walking is the default way humans move about. Some people feel afraid or ashamed when they’re questioned by the police about why they’re walking (down a public street at six o’clock in the evening), and some of them may have reasons. Certainly the idea that other people think walking is such odd behavior that they don’t even want to ask us why we’re doing it, or whether we want any kind of help, amounts to “peer pressure” applied to people who might feel inclined to save money or improve their health by walking instead of driving across town. I can deal with that because my family are about as solid a feature of the local landscape as the baby-faced trooper's family are. Someone less secure would have been humiliated...for doing something that is healthy and public-spirited.

People whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers need to be proactive about applying “peer pressure” in the opposite direction. They should be coming up with public campaigns to THANK PEDESTRIANS FOR NOT DRIVING. Instead of acting as if non-drivers were suspicious characters, they should be publicizing the statistics about how many resources we’re not wasting, how much we’re not contributing to local warming, how much our presence serves as a deterrent to street crime, and how many little children we’re not maiming or killing.

I've spoken much more severely to some other officers, who were also in my brother's class at school, than I did to baby-face; I wasn't sure whether he was an old acquaintance or not, and in any case he wasn't a relative like the one I positively scolded. The man with what I still saw as a younger-child face didn’t seem to know me and he did seem tense. He didn’t seem to understand why I was speaking severely to him at all.

I had time to wonder, while the trooper was bandying my real name about on the scanner, whether he was being set up. I wondered whether new state troopers get those “concern calls” to annoy me because their colleagues think it’s funny to get them scolded by a taxpayer.

I said, “I will be making a complaint about this harassment.”

He looked indignant—as if there were any question of his having behaved improperly toward a woman, which there wasn’t. I felt empathetic and elder-sisterly, or auntly, or whichever. Assuming sufficient reason for his believing it was appropriate for him to check whether I had a criminal record—which I don’t—he did that in a perfectly professional manner. He said, “Harassment?”

I said, “Yes, I don’t think you should participate in this kind of games. You have better things to do and so have I.”

He actually blathered about my not wearing any special reflective gear. Really. The only excuse for the existence of those dreadful pale-colored glossy fake-leather shoes, much less for anyone wearing pale-colored shoes in winter, was that they were reflective. I don’t normally wear white shoes, even in summer, but taxpayers have a right to walk down the street unmolested if they choose to wear solid black from head to toe.

Seriously, I don’t know whether there was a real “concerned citizen” call, or one was fabricated by another trooper as a sort of initiation prank. I do know this, though. In any town that’s big enough to have a drug treatment clinic, silly calls from “concerned citizens” are likely to be made when there is a special reason to want the friendly local policeman to keep away from a certain street. “Somebody’s walking down the street in the rain!” and “There’s a cat about fifteen feet up a tree!” are just the sort of distractions that make a caller sound stupid, but not so obviously suspicious as if the caller had reported an imaginary crime or fire.

I think it would be a good idea if all police departments were required by law to investigate these “concerned citizen” calls—not by checking the identity of the person walking down the street, but by checking the identity, and also the circle of association, of the callers. While baby-face was politely annoying me, it’s very likely that the druggies who hang around the clinic in the evening were waiting for a special delivery from Tennessee. The person they were waiting for would have crossed baby-face’s path about a mile past the point where he was checking my legal identity.

I think it would be a good idea if all police officers, and their families, were required by law to show respect for pedestrians’ rights by walking across town regularly, just to break up the perception that anyone is stereotyping pedestrians as suspicious characters.

I think it would be a good idea if all police departments proactively hired law-abiding pedestrians, especially women, just to break up the perception that we can ever afford to allow anyone to feel that our streets don’t belong to women—at all hours of the day and night. Or that employers can afford to discriminate against women who don’t drive because it’s acceptable for anyone to be able to imagine that women are more likely to be raped while walking to work than they are to be injured in car crashes while driving to work. (I’ve encountered overt discrimination for that reason, and I also think it would be a good thing if all employers were required by law to pay an extra road tax for any failure to prioritize hiring people who walk to work.) Public employees should be actively promoting the idea that “A woman’s place is out in the air and sunshine...a criminal’s place is behind bars.”

I think it might even be a good idea if all people who make “concerned citizen” calls were routinely told that, since they’re such “concerned citizens,” they need to show their good faith and public spirit by walking up and down the street. Every pedestrian on the street is a deterrent to crime; even the lookouts from drug gangs who make these “concerned citizen” calls would serve as deterrents to other types of street crime, and these “concerned” people might actually make themselves useful to some law-abiding person somewhere, as well as being made less available to criminal gangs. It’s even possible that, if required to walk fifteen miles a night for a few months, some sincerely concerned citizens might get lives.