A long Twitter thread on the modern policing of black bodies in America...

How my boyfriend got pulled over by the police for giving a beggar at 7-11 change: A Thread.

Hermione Danger
‏@kelseybew_

My hands are still shaking and im sorta chain smoking so there may be typos. Y’all gon deal with it.

So my boyfriend went to drop off his friend at the airport last night. He went to the Newport News one which is like 45 minutes from our place in Norfolk. He left like 10:30pm. He dropped him off, text me he was on his way home, and stopped at a 7-11 in VA Beach.

When he went back outside, apparently there was a man out there begging for change, which is typical 7-1- behavior. My boo gave him 50 cents before getting back in his car and getting on the interstate. Soon as he gets on he sees those blue lights behind him and pulls over.

Cop comes up to his car; boo had put his wallet on his dashboard and got out his license, but his phone was in his pocket. So the cop comes up to his window and says “I saw you at 7-11 give that man something. They’ve been complaining about that man saying he has drugs” blah blah

So the cop goes to run his license and comes back. He’s all “where’s your insurance information?”

...We literally JUST got new car insurance Friday. They haven’t even issued our cards yet. We don’t have a printer and he didn’t think to print them at work...

The only way to get him the insurance info would be to go on his phone. So he tells the cop this.

Then, the cop tells him his car smells like weed.

Y’all...there wasn’t a gawtdamn thing in that car.

Anyway.

So now the cop wants him to get out the car and put his hands on his head, which he does, with his back turned to the officer (per officer). So then the cop tells him to pull his phone out his pocket.

He tells him to do this while pointing his gun at his back.

So by now my man is FREAKING OUT. He is SHOOK. He says “Officer I don’t feel comfortable reaching in my pocket with you pointing your gun at me. My phone is black. You can get my *wallet* out my pocket”

*he was so scared he accidentally said wallet instead of phone.*

So Officer Spaz A Lot starts screaming at him because of his tongue twist. He’s all “You said phone now you’re saying wallet WHICH ONE IS IT?!” like he didn’t see that bot’s whole wallet on his dashboard when he went to get his license in the first place.

So my baby starts crying, y’all. A 31 year old man straight BAWLING cause he’s terrified that if he reaches for his pocket he’s going to get shot. And the cop keeps yelling at him to just do it, never lowering his damn gun.

He’s yelling “What are you crying for ARE YOU GUILTY OF SOMETHING?”

And it probably would’ve been a long cycle of more yelling and more crying if two more cop cars and the sheriff’s car didn’t pull up behind them.

So three other cops come up, and the sheriff. There’s a woman cop with her male partner, a third cop who cam in his own squad car, and the sheriff, who is the only person at this scene with any sense of duty for his job.

One of the male cops asks what’s going on and boo boo tells them the cop wants him to get his phone out his pocket but he doesn’t want to reach himself and, you know, get shot. So a cop takes his phone out his pocket for him and hands it to the original douche-cop.

When the cop who got the phone hands it off, original cop has the nerve to say “I wasn’t pointing my gun at him, I had my taser out.”

Boyfriend:

He says to them “Officers it was a gun. I know what an issued taser looks like because it looks like *insert description here* right?” When the sheriff confirmed he was right he went “Yeah, that officer had his gun on me.”

Officer: “I’m not going to argue with him about it”

So at this point, I’ve been blowing up his phone, because I told y’all he left the house at 10:30pm for a 40 minute drive and it’s now 2am

The whole time he’d been begging the officer to just let him call me and tell me where he was and what was going on. He even asked if they could call me if he unlocked his phone. Finally after everyone ignored him, the sheriff let him use his phone to text me.

I fucked up tho because I kept calling him so when he went to text me I called, he went “wait, she’s calling me-“ and the original officer YANKED his phone and threw it on the dashboard of his squad car.

So the four officers go to the original officer’s car and have a ki ki while waiting on a damn K-9 unit to come search my boyfriend’s drug less car. They also breathalyzed him, because giving homeless men change obviously means you’re drunk.

The cops leave him sitting on the side of the road, cuffed. Only the sheriff would sit with him.

And honestly im over cops as a whole at this point but this sheriff was so kind to him while everyone else treated him like a criminal. He sat right beside him and just talked.

“I can understand why you’re so afraid. You’re a young black man, and I’m sure you aren’t a bad kid, you’re a good guy.”

Yeah dude...TELL THAT TO YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS.

So finally the K-9 unit gets there. They start going through his car. HURLING shit out the car, throwing things everywhere, big ass Fido is taking up that lil ass Chevy Cruze tryna come up with some “treats”.

Nothing. They ain’t find a damn thing. They all sat there for over an hour waiting on Cujo Adjacent to get there and bust a black man’s business wide open.

They thought.

So finally, after they’ve torn his car to shreds and lost a good third of his possessions (they literally threw his whole cooler from his trunk somewhere and he couldn’t even fucking find it) they uncuff him, give him his license, blah blah. No apologies. No “damn dawg my b”.

Just left the man with a dirty car and sore wrists. They’d only even loosened his cuffs a bit after the sheriff got there.

The sheriff tho, for his credit, gave my man his info. Told him that they were in HIS jurisdiction and that he hadn’t done anything wrong and to call him-

-if needed.

So FINALLY he was able to call me. At this point all I’d gotten was a frantic jumbled “I got pulled over and they’re searching my car text” so I had literally gotten in my car to search precents after an hour had gone by and I ain’t hear nothing else.

He called me before I made it to Chesapeake City Jail. Dawg I was finna drive there, VA Beach, Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton...I ain’t give a FUCK. As soon as I saw that text my heart dropped. As soon as I saw that text I was terrified I wouldn’t see him alive again.

The timing was just too damn long, ya know? He called me SOBBING. SOBBINGGGG.

He said he’d never been more terrified in his life. And this is a man whose car has been shot at before. He said he just knew when that gun’s Officer was pointed at his back he was going to die.

He said his life started flashing before his eyes. All the things he wouldn’t be able to do. How he was never going to see any of us again.

Chile...

And I just...I’m soooo MAD. And it’s that mad you get when you’re powerless. There was literally nothing any of us could’ve done.

That man got pulled over because an officer saw him give someone CHANGE.

And my boyfriend is a good man. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He will do anything for anyoneeee, even if it’s to his own detriment.

But the media wouldn’t have seen that. They would’ve seen a thug. Someone who “had to have done something” to get pulled over.

That man works and comes home. He plays video games. He cooks Sunday breakfasts. He paints murals on my grandparents’ walls. HE GIVES TO STRANGERS.

And allllll they would’ve seen is another “worthless” black male getting what was coming.

He finally got home around 4am. Crying, shaking, unable to sit still. He was like “I didn’t leave Georgia for this shit.”

Boyyyyyy I don’t know who told you Virginia was any better 🤦🏽‍♀️

Anyway. We ALL “know” police brutality is real. Last night/this morning it got too damn real.

I have a final today. I’m going to fucking fail it. I can’t.

I cant even bring myself to care. At least my man’s not fucking dead.

So, yeah. Shoutout to Sheriff Smith, cause who knows what would’ve happened if your somewhat competent ass wouldn’t have pulled up.

Your system and your people suck tho, so FUCK THE POLICE.

I think I’m done. I think that’s all I got. I’m going to smoke another cigarette now.

I will never look at anyyyyy of these cops the same. And I wish a white person WOULD with me. (Some of them)be the same ones scared of all black people since they were robbed by one in 1996.

TUH.

And that, my twitter friends, is how my boyfriend got pulled over by the police for being a Good Samaritan.

Excuse me while I go grieve for the further loss of our innocence.

I appreciate all the encouraging words and support. I can’t keep up.

Thanks so much for letting me vent to y’all. Sometimes you just need to know that good people are out there.