From Mother to Suspect, in an Instant

A little more than a year ago, I had my first encounter with the police as a suspect. After my 2-year-old daughter's pediatrician appointment, while she was in the throes of a tantrum over donuts, she and I boarded a city bus. Soon her tirade became worse, the screaming louder, punctuated with protestations like "You take your hands off me! and I want to go home!"

After several embarrassing moments of trying to calm her while she pummeled me with her toddler's rage, I noticed that the driver had pulled the bus over between stops. He got off , and soon two white police officers boarded and asked me, very politely, very gently to get off the bus. I couldn't imagine why. I had certainly been subjected to the screams of other people's children many times, and their parents had never been asked to leave the bus. Nevertheless I complied.

One of the officers then took my daughter, while the other began asking me questions about her crying. They remarked that she looked nothing like me . Well, that's true, but where's the crime in that? They looked at me and saw an obvious black woman, but I could tell that when they looked at her they were not quite certain of her ethnicity, since she looks very "other".

They began asking questions about my relationship with her. My initial thought was that they figured I had smacked her to induce the screaming, so I assumed I was defending myself against child abuse. But then their questions were more about what she was saying than how loudly she was saying it. When it finally hit me that these two cops thought I had snatched my daughter, I became so nervous and so scared of the possibility that this situation could go so terribly wrong, that I just kept talking.

I'm not sure of what I said - I just know that I didn't want to go to jail, or to be roughed up, or worse. And mostly, I wanted my daughter back in my arms. I don't know any mother so prepared that she travels with her child's birth certificate just in case she has to prove that she's the mother, but there I stood, suspect in their eyes.

So, we were at an impasse. I with no proof that this screaming child was indeed my child, and they with the suspicion that I abducted her. Then I remembered that I had stuck her prescription from the doctor in my pocket, so I handed it to one of the officers. He went to his car for several minutes and returned, simply saying, "Yeah, it's okay". The other officer handed me my daughter, who was still screaming, but now at a fevered pitch, and let us be on our way.

It didn't strike me until much later, that they never apologized for the mistake, or misunderstanding, or whatever they would have called it. And I never even knew their names, or their precinct number.

When I told my friends and family about my ordeal, the reaction was the same. "I know you, of all people, didn't let them get away with that," my mother said. "I know you let them have it," a friend said.

The truth is, while ordinarily I speak my mind, this time I was forced to submit to my fear. Those officers got to see me in a way - docile and silenced - that I had rarely, if ever, seen myself. It was humiliating, and it stole from me, if only in that moment, a piece of my humanity.

As a mother, part of me can't help feeling that if my daughter had actually been abducted by someone, I would have expected the police to do nothing less than what they did. But, as a black woman, I can't help being chilled to my very foundation by the thought of how things could have escalated.

This was my worst nightmare realized - being suspected by the police when I've done nothing wrong. When I see police officers cruising through the quiet, placid streets of my neighborhood in Riverdale, when I'm driving down the West Side Highway, when I'm doing anything and see a cop, my first thought is not that protection is near. My first impulse is to fear. I fear that I will be mistakenly identified as a felon. I fear that I will be pulled over just because I'm a black person driving a decent car. I fear that I will be shot because they think my purse, or candy bar, or my daughter's toy anything is a gun.

When I look back on that day, standing vulnerable and accused in front of two white cops who held my child, I think of what-ifs. What if they'd started shooting when I went into my pocket for the prescription? What if they'd mistaken my nervous chatter for a drug-induced frenzy? What if I had said one thing that rubbed them the wrong way? It's frighteningly clear to me that compared with many others with black skin who have been stopped by the police, I was lucky.

Patricia Jones lives and writes in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Essence, Mother Jones, Family Circle, American Visions, Black Enterprise, and Woman's Day, among others. Passing is her first novel.

This article was first published on February 27, 1999 in the New York Times. It appeared in the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting.