I am not a member of any identifiable minority community, nonetheless, on four separate occasions, I have found myself targeted by weapons held in the hands of armed police.
In 1965, during the Vietnam War, a military guard threatened to shoot me if I trespassed onto the Concord Naval Weapons Station. I told him I was an unarmed peace activist. When a truck loaded with napalm bombs approached, I walked through the main gate and stopped in front of the truck, forcing it to a halt. Fortunately, the young soldier decided not to open fire.
One night, working late in my downtown office, I heard a noise in the hallway. When I opened the door, the hallway lights were out. Suddenly, I was surrounded by three strangers shouting, brandishing weapons, and demanding that I put my hands in the air. They turned out to be Berkeley police. After determining that I was unarmed, they explained that they had received a report of a burglary in progress.
One day in downtown Berkeley, I attempted to take a news photograph of a Brinks armored car guard holding a shotgun as he stood next to the Wells Fargo building. As I looked through my viewfinder, I saw the guard shoulder his rifle and point it in my direction. He shouted a blunt warning: "Drop the camera or I'll shoot."
On another occasion, while leaving Berkeley's Ecology Center late one night, I made a perfectly legal U-turn on San Pablo Avenue. When a nearby police car announced its presence with a siren blast and flashing lights, I realized that I had neglected to turn on my headlights.
Embarrassed by my lapse, I pulled over, parked the car and emerged laughing. I began to offer an apology. "Sorry!" I told the officer, "I know why you stopped me."
I expected to find the driver of the cop car grinning and sharing my embarrassment. What I saw stopped me in my tracks: The police officer was cowering behind the open door of her squad car with her service revolver aimed directly at my chest.
She subsequently explained something about criminal behavior that I was not aware of. "When a police officer stops you," she said, "you are supposed to remain in your vehicle. Only the bad guys get out of the car."
Well, live and learn. (Or, as sometimes happens in these spooked-cop cases, you learn and die.)
The Mindset of the Modern Cop
All of these incidents have something in common: they were all rooted in the presumption that I posed a threat to these officers—even though they were the ones who were armed.
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