Arms and the Men

The same crime element that white people are scared of, Black people are scared of. The same crime element that white people fear, Black people fear. So, we defend our self from the same crime element that they are scared of... While they [white Americans] are waiting for legislation to pass and everything, we’re next door to the killer, we’re next door to him you know. Because we’re up in the projects ... All them killers that they letting out, they’re right there in that building. Just because we’re black we get along with the killers or something? We get along with rapists because we’re black and from the same hood? What is that? We need protection too.

— Tupac Shakur

When I was writing my dissertation as a doctoral student at Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice, I decided to move from my apartment in Brooklyn back to my mother’s home in Philadelphia. I spent 18 months writing my dissertation in her basement. During a two-month period, there were three armed robberies of delivery men from the local pizza shop and Chinese carry-out that occurred on the steps of my mother’s home.

The crimes, the police response — and what it all did to me — tell a depressing but illuminating tale about Black Americans, law enforcement and community violence. The upshot of the story is that chronic police neglect is one of the major factors motivating Black Americans’ propensity to carry firearms and consider using them.

The first robbery, which I didn’t witness, was of a pizza delivery driver. I discovered it after a pizza was left on my mother’s steps alongside a receipt. When I called the pizza shop to ask why a pizza was there when I had not ordered one, I was told that the delivery guy had been robbed at my home. The staff told me to keep the pizza and immediately hung up. Ironically, neither my mother nor I had heard the robbery, but it is easy to imagine how vulnerable we then felt, knowing someone was robbed on the steps of our home.

A week later, a second robbery occurred, in which two cheesesteaks were left on my step along with a receipt from the same pizza shop. Angry and frustrated, I called the shop a second time. I told the manager if another order was placed using my mother’s address, he should not send the food to our home.

After the second robbery, I reviewed the two receipts and noticed that the assailant used the same phone number for both orders, and it was a number that I knew. The phone number on both receipts was the number of my mother’s landscaper, who lived four houses down on the opposite side of the street. Mr. Jones (not his real name) was an older man in his 70s who ran a fairly successful landscaping company in our neighborhood. The majority of homes on my mother’s block were his clients.

Mr. Jones had a grandson in his early 20s who had been recently released from prison and was living at his home. From my observations, his grandson did not work and spent the majority of his time walking between his grandfather’s home and Somerville Avenue, where the pizza shop and the Chinese carryout were located.

For several reasons, it seemed pretty clear to me that he could have been behind the robberies. First, he had a perfect line of sight to our home from his grandfather’s home and therefore could easily time the arrival of the delivery driver. Second, the proximity of his home would allow him to quickly conduct a robbery and be back in his home within minutes. Finally, he literally used his home phone number to place delivery orders, which was not too bright.

The third robbery I actually witnessed. It was around 10 p.m. My doorbell rang, and, when I opened the front door, I witnessed a man wearing a dark-colored hoodie holding a chrome gun, which he had placed against the head of the delivery man. The assailant was pushing the delivery driver around as the delivery driver screamed and pleaded for his life. The only thing I could think of doing at the time was to yell “Get off of him!” Startled, the gunman pushed the delivery driver down my steps and ran away. He could have easily shot both of us; fortunately, he did not.

The delivery driver repeatedly thanked me for saving his life. I was pretty traumatized, and, after a few minutes of processing what had just happened, I gathered myself and called 911.

When the police arrived, the officers asked the driver and me to come to the police station to meet with detectives. I brought the receipts from the previous robberies, and the delivery driver also brought his receipt for the Chinese food, which had the same phone number. With our evidence, I assumed the case would be resolved immediately — but this was not television. I gave the receipts to the detectives and explained my thoughts regarding the identity of who the assailant was.

I was extremely detailed. The detectives had given us a photo album to identify the assailant. I had only seen this procedure on television shows, but it is actually a real procedure. Neither the delivery driver nor I could identify the assailant because at the time of the incident, he was wearing a hoodie. We did not see his face. After scanning what seemed like hundreds of faces in the photo album, I saw a picture of my landscaper’s grandson. I pointed to the picture and told the detective this was the guy who I thought was behind the robberies.

The detectives were nonchalant, almost dismissive with their response. They asked no further questions. I went back to my mother’s home to deal with the trauma of what just happened and the realization that the police were not there to serve us.

My mother was pretty distraught by the incident. Over the next three weeks, I continued to see the grandson walking around the neighborhood. Frustrated that he was still on the streets, one day, I decided to confront him. I asked whether he knew who was committing the robberies. He responded that he was recently released from prison, paroled to his grandfather’s home and trying to get his life together. It was the perfect story, but my gut feeling said it was all a lie. His lack of eye contact and body language didn’t help.

To see him walking freely in my neighborhood left me with the feeling that my mother and I were on our own. The police were not there to help us. We lived on edge every night wondering: Would there be another robbery at our home?

The only option we had was to protect ourselves. I owned a gun, a Glock 19, which I had purchased a few years prior. For the first time in my life, I contemplated taking justice into my own hands. The repeated targeting of my home was a form of disrespect that required retaliation. It was also the first time I felt fearful living in my mother’s home. My sense of safety was broken.

Just think of the irony of the situation: Here I was, a doctoral candidate in criminology writing a dissertation on the social context of adolescent violence among Black boys, using the theoretical framework of the code of the street developed by urban sociologist Elijah Anderson, which essentially argues that disrespect is at the heart of interpersonal violence among urban Black boys and men. The conundrum of deliberating whether I should retaliate captures the complex intersectional identities of many Black scholars — one that is quite different from our white peers because we often live and were raised in communities similar to the places and spaces we study.

For me to shoot this young man for his disrespect would effectively dismiss the harm caused by the structural violence that potentially contributed to his need to commit economic crimes. Structural violence is the idea that existing social structures or institutions harm people — effectively commit violence against them — by stopping them from meeting their basic needs.

Evidence of it is everywhere. Studies have shown the negative labor market effects of felony disenfranchisement for Black men with the mark of a felony record. In 2012, Becky Pettit found that the mark of a felony record renders Black men as invisible second citizens. In 2019, George Karandinos and Philippe Bourgois noted that the disproportionate incarceration and mass supervision of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans represents a form of structural violence.

This is what had happened in my life, and the life of this possible assailant: In a strange twist of irony, the criminal legal system had rendered both invisible — exemplifying one of the core concepts of structural violence.

Dr. Johan Galtung, the pioneer of thinking on structural violence, conceptualized violence as beyond billy clubs, batons, barricades and bullets. Hoping to overturn conventional thinking, he sought to broaden our understanding of violence. He explains that structural violence is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs” or, in other words, preventable harm. It impedes the development of the full human potential in an individual, and thus society. Galtung’s account relies heavily on the language of invisibility, and it assumes that the persistence of structural violence over time and across generations is a function of that invisibility. If only we could “see” such violence, Galtung implies, we would be able to stop it.

The criminal legal system treated both of us, perpetrator and victim, as if we were invisible. I never received a call, an update, a follow-up or a thank-you from a detective. I realized that no one was coming to save us.

This experience solidified my belief that the police were not legitimate. As an early adolescent growing up in Philadelphia, I had watched the police drop a bomb on MOVE, killing 11 people (including five children) and burning down two city blocks of homes owned by Black residents. Those images are forever imprinted in my memory, and helped shape my belief that when their power is unchecked, the police can be tantamount to domestic terrorists.

As a scholar who studies crime and violence, particularly the impact of structural violence on interpersonal/community violence, I know that my perspective is common among many Black Americans. We are either hypersurveilled or depoliced.

But while we devote significant time and resources to understanding the effects of hypersurveillance and overpolicing in Black communities, we minimize the structural violence of depolicing. How many times have residents of Black communities witnessed known robbers, shooters and murderers in our neighborhoods freely walking the streets despite law enforcement and prosecutors having enough probable cause to arrest and incarcerate?

Currently in Philadelphia, many residents are criticizing District Attorney Larry Krasner because of the perception in many Black communities impacted by high rates of gun violence that the DA’s Office and Philadelphia Police Department are “too soft on crime.” But this is not just a Philadelphia problem. After the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore at the hands of Baltimore police in 2015, I clearly recall Black Baltimoreans complaining that the police were no longer responding to crime and violence — which in my opinion contributed to Baltimore experiencing 300-plus homicides per year following Gray’s death.

At that time, many criminologists claimed that there was no Ferguson or Freddie Gray Effect. But the streets were telling a different story than academia. Years later, social scientists and investigative journalists found that depolicing was actually occurring in Baltimore, Chicago and other U.S. cities, particularly in cities that had experienced “viral” incidents: high-profile, highly controversial episodes of police using deadly force against civilians.

My experience provided a much more nuanced insight into why many Black boys and young Black men illegally carry guns. It is the fear, trauma and stark realization that law enforcement and other safety net institutions are not coming to help us. We are on our own. As the late, great Tupac Shakur noted, we are just as interested in protecting ourselves from crime as other Americans, if not more so. But we are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Either we are hypersurveilled, treated with a lack of professionalism, brutalized and potentially killed by law enforcement or, on the other end of the spectrum, totally dismissed — as Ralph Ellison noted, “invisible.” Both responses are violent. As an ethnographer who pays homage to hip-hop culture in all of my work, the lyrics of Lauryn Hill’s song “Black Rage” best capture the trauma of structural and police violence in Black America:

Black rage is founded on blatant denial

Squeezed economics, subsistence survival

Deafening silence and social control

Black rage is founded on wounds in the soul.