March 28th, 2012 5:20 p.m.
As I come to, as the tingly grey scale puzzle shaped pieces of life slowly float back into place, I am overwhelmed by the taste of hot iron in my mouth. I feel a warm stream of wetness dripping from my nose. My face is numb. My throat is numb. My tongue is numb and so are my hands. Well, maybe not as much numbness, but a feeling of an intense fire on those specified areas of my body causing my nerves endings to be over saturated with action. There is no possible way that this puzzle is real life; it seems too dreamy, too unreal, too unbelievable, too stupid to be true. I’m working right now. This can’t be real. This can’t really be happening.
As my eyes formulate my setting, I see a shriveled up contact that looks very familiar laying amongst a puddle of splattered blood. I am unbearably trapped; face down on the sidewalk with a knee on each side of my neck. More knees, legs, and the body weight of three gym rats are crashing into my back and legs.
While this puzzle is piecing itself back together, my face consistently clashes with the jagged sidewalk. Every time I try to pull my head up a little bit, it’s forced back down into the razor blades of the concrete by an unfailing push of a knee or an elbow, or both, on the back of my head. My wrists are wrangled with handcuffs that cut through my skin and stop the circulation to my hands. Breathing is increasingly difficult. There’s a viciously sharp stinging sensation shooting through my ribs as they dig into the concrete from the power of the knees in my back. My windpipe feels swollen shut from the force of the grip on the sleeper hold I just encountered. I have a chunk of my tongue missing as I try to talk and end up spitting out a mouthful of the iron that I continue to taste.
As a set of knees and weight scatter from my body, black boots come into focus. They hold a short, stocky, kneeling man in a blue uniform. He’s screaming, “Look at what you did!!!!” He then raises the level even more and starts shouting obscenities while bending low and showing me his bloodied elbow as if I somehow forced him to put me into a choke hold and slam me to the ground, effectively scrapping his elbow and knocking me unconscious.
This all feels like a sick joke, but in my stomach I feel the realness of the situation as the helpless pit of hopelessness has arrived. The pit at the bottom of the power tower, lost in the clutches, along for the ride, wherever the powerful ones take you. The pit that embodies the feeling deep inside when you realize you are in a position of having no say in what is happening with your life, and worse yet it’s the maniacal “justice” system that’s in charge. That’s one of the worst, most indescribable feelings.
It takes me a minute to clear my throat enough to speak. While getting kneeled on, I stare at his boots walking on my right side as he continues to antagonize me. “This is all your fault!!” He continues, “Look what this fucker did!” speaking to his partner I presume.
The scent of the grass in Star’s yard invigorates me for a moment as I lay face down on the sidewalk and my left leg brushes the fence encapsulating her yard. When I can finally muster speech out of my wind pipe, it matters not, they won’t listen, they’re too busy re-iterating their story of events. I dejectedly let my head get pushed back down into the razors.
A puzzle piece or two ago, at pretty much this very spot on the sidewalk, I was calmly but briskly, asking Star’s frantically animated mom, “What happened? What can I do?” She was being led into a transport police car to be ushered against her will downtown to the new “public safety” building. Her long straight hair extensions frazzled together and held a static type mane, as verbiage exploded out of her mouth.
After explaining that the police just walked into her house because of a phone call they had received from someone call she frantically says, “Call my sister!!!”
At the word “sister”, three uniforms start to put her back first into the transport police car. She was handcuffed, but in the front, and with zip ties. She is tall and thin and there was a good hand behind her head to protect it from banging into the car as she goes back first. Then there was a bad hand. The hand of Badge 6062, the same blue suit who took me down mere seconds later, rams his hand into her neck to force her into the backseat of the car. Unprovoked, he literally choked her in the throat to push her into the backseat. He put his hand completely around her throat to push her. Her 8th grade daughter Star, her son, and a family friend were all standing on their doorstep watching this unfold, as well as the group of children across the street just getting out of school.
For the last four years, Star and her brother have been in the After School program at a non-profit where I work, and her mother is a part of the parent group there. I am their teacher, their van driver, and the program supervisor and today, right now, I am working. I’m not supposed to be face down on the concrete getting arrested. Star’s mom is not supposed to be getting arrested and not supposed to be getting choked while being put into the back of a squad car.
Having family members and friends victims of police brutality, means I’m not new to the realities that police abuse their power. Minneapolis police are some of the best at that abuse. Knowing that the only way to get proof of cops actions is to video record them, that’s what I did. I pulled out my camera phone and started to ask for their badge numbers while proceeding to ‘shoot the cops’ or more appropriately ‘film the police’. That this would be the outcome was beyond me, 23 seconds of filming badge numbers of a situation that I was not a part of, turned into this?
March 31st, 2012
Three days later, in the clutches of the controllers, in the pit of the power tower, yet mere floors above the Mayor’s office and a floor underneath the big clock, I hear a chopped up rendition of my name called over the PA system into our pod, “Wrap your sheets up, come to the door.” I excitedly grab my things and say my goodbyes to the ten pod mates I had. I walk around two of the seats that outline one of the five circular hollowed out metal tables within the living pod. The loud crackle of metal on metal is somehow joyous this time as the door pops open. The anticipatory process of release is a journey worth at least four hours of your life that you’ll never retrieve. I know I have an uphill fight to get justice and rid myself of the ‘obstruction of a lawful execution -with force-’ and ‘disorderly conduct’ charges labeled against me, so my “four hours” isn’t as carefree as it usually is. It is, however, a special feeling of a bit of vindication. A special feeling that people were outside making calls for me and the fact that an internal investigation was opened into the case, is a bit vindicating. Yet, the feeling of pessimism reigns supreme like a rolling dark-blue storm cloud. I know that I am just one small case in the thousands of incidents of police brutality, I know the “justice” system is an oxymoron in itself.
November 9th, 2012
A full nine months later, at my sixth court date for this episode of unjust repression, they offer me one last deal before taking it to trial. For the fourth time they wanted me to plead guilty to some sort of lesser charge for a period of time in jail and years of probation. I had different prosecutors at each of the six court dates and none of them took enough time to review the case beyond the police report. As you can imagine, I didn’t accept the plea deal and chose to set up a trial date.
Two weeks before my jury trial was to start, I received a letter in the mail dated January 2, 2013. The letter stated “After reviewing all the related video associated with this matter, the State finds there is insufficient evidence to successfully prosecute the defendant.” The prosecutor finally took the time to look beyond the police report.
I ‘shot the cops’ and it was my saving grace as my 23 seconds of footage exonerated me.
*
I still wake up at night with that knot. I wake up with that pit in my stomach, that consistent blow inside of my chest that only hurts my emotions. It only hurts my soul. It’s like a closed-fist swing, a punch, that goes through mass and bones, like ghosts go through walls, then it hits me. Hits me right in the emotional shell and ripples through me, causing fervors of agony. It shakes the outer layers of my soul. It turns my blood into heat. It disseminates my positivity and empathetic tendencies. It instills the most horrific intensity of hatred deep inside the labyrinth of my inner being.
It feels like a few minutes ago that I was chasing the grey piece with my eyes trying to find life again. It feels like a few minutes ago I was laying there with my face on the razors. Laying there lucky enough to have privileged white pigmented skin, for if this were not the case, my encounter would undoubtedly have been much more severe. The physical scars heal quite quickly but the emotional and mental scars will haunt me forever. I would never change my actions though. I will always ‘shoot the cops’ when I see them abuse their authority, as you should.
The Work of Niko G 