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Cops Treat Students Harshly

The Oberlin Review, February 20, 2004

OBERLIN, OH -- I am a young black male. That being said, I have a lot of “special” circumstances that I have to deal with on a regular basis.

It may not be fair, or right, but its something that most young black men have to deal with. Racism is everywhere, whether people want to believe it or not, but what happened to me around Christmas time here in Oberlin went against everything that I thought I knew about the school and town.

Late one night, my good friend Andy Esteep, a college first-year student, and I were driving home from Super K-Mart in Andy’s car. As we drove back into Oberlin Andy said that he needed to stop by the First Merit ATM for some cash.

On the corner of Main and College Andy made a left-hand turn onto College and for some reason didn’t see that a police officer was in his patrol car coming through the intersection. Andy didn’t yield and the officer promptly pulled us over in front of First Merritt and the Apollo.

The cop approached the driver’s side window and went through the usual series of questions as he shined a flashlight in our faces. He asked Andy why he didn’t yield and if he had his driver’s license and registration. Andy answered his questions, gave him his license and registration, and the officer returned to his cruiser. By this time a second police car had pulled up along side the first officer’s car. The two officers talked for a moment before one of them came back to the car and asked Andy to step out of the car.

The officer patted down Andy and then took him back to his patrol car. Meanwhile, the second officer proceeded to bring out a police dog, which he then led around Andy’s car. The dog sniffed around the car for about five minutes, while I sat in the passenger’s seat and began to wonder what the officers would do next.

After the police dog was put back into the police cruiser, the officer came back and asked me to get out of the car. I got out and he patted me down and asked me if I had any prescription drugs on my person.

I told him that I didn’t, and he asked if I knew whether or not there were any prescription drugs in the car. Being that it wasn’t my car I told him I didn’t know. After questioning me the officer searched Andy’s car by hand; looking through Andy’s laundry, backpack, glove compartment, floorboards and trunk.

He found no prescription drugs, or any illegal substances. During all of this Andy was being questioned in the other officer’s patrol car.

Nearly 45 minutes had passed from the time we were initially pulled over to when they finally let Andy go with a ticket for not yielding to traffic. When Andy got back into the car he was very upset.

I asked him what the officer had said to him and he told me that the officer tried to suggest that I could have drugs on my person. The officer asked him questions like “Does your friend have any drugs on him?” And when Andy told him that we were friends the officer asked him “Well, how long have you known him?” as if to suggest that we weren’t really good friends.

I was a little shocked. Now I’ll admit that I personally have never been pulled over by the police before but I have been in the car while my friends were pulled over, and what happened on the corner of Main and College was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

This may seem extreme to some, but I was literally waiting for them to pull me out of the car and put me in handcuffs. In my head it was only a matter of minutes before I would have become another young black male on the hood of a car with a police officer holding him down from behind. If it weren’t for Andy vouching for me, I could have very well ended up there.

When we returned to our dorm, we retold the story to most of the people on our floor. Each time we told the story, we received similar reactions. It wasn’t until this month that I told the story to friends that became truly outraged at the situation.

They’re the ones who encouraged me to write this. Maybe I hadn’t thought about writing it partly because as a black male, I’ve always known that my encounters with the police could end up that way. And frankly, that is a very sad thing to say.

It’s sad to say that here in 2004, when we celebrate Black History month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, where Oprah Winfrey is a media mogul, where Halle Berry and Denzel Washington are winning Academy Awards that I, and millions of other black youths would have to deal with this kind of treatment.

And it’s even sadder to say that it happened here in a town that used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, here in the home of abolition and the Lane Debates, here in Oberlin.

—Jared Glenn
College first-year

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Additional information was provided on this stop in the Oberlin Review on February 27, 2004 by the Chief of Police in denial of the allegations, of course.  The police officers were Ptl. Roger Southworth and Sgt. Scalli.

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