A(PD)CL: Police Profiling at Austin City Limits
You’ve read this before. This is the story of me, a black man, and a group of brown people being profiled by the police. You’ve read something like this hundreds of times and heard it countless others. This isn’t the first or the worst time this has happened to me, and this is a far cry from the police brutality we’ve been conditioned to calmly observe on our feeds, but I’m going to tell my story anyway.
I don’t want to tell the internet about my weekend. I’d much rather keep my private life just that. I’m telling my story, like countless others, so that the collective weight of these narratives might break the pillars supporting the racist institutions at our country’s core.
This all happened Friday.
I went to Austin City Limits Festival this weekend. Without Donald Glover. While I went to work, writing about the environment, music and musicians around me, I also went as a fan. After completing my work Friday, in anticipation of enjoying artists like Noname, David Byrne, and that greatest of the psychedelic Beatles, Paul McCartney, I didn’t drink. I smoked weed.
I know that my actions violated United States laws. I’m not ashamed of what I did. I smoked because under the influence of marijuana I can understand and express knowledge of the world around me and the music within it with more depth and clarity than I’ve found possible otherwise.
While I disagree with those laws, I don’t make a habit of breaking them publicly unless I’m around a host of other people doing the same. Traditionally, American music festivals operate as a safe haven for those who wish to enjoy recreational, social drug usage while listening to live music. Despite the laws in this country, people have been happily enjoying peaceful drugs in public at music festivals since grandma grew grass and tripped at Woodstock.
I’ve seen it for close to a decade from tens of thousands of people at hundreds of concerts and dozens of festivals. I know from experience that it should be something I enjoy peacefully just like the majority of the population of people who choose that path.
That history, in combination with the thousands of strangers surrounding me at ACL ingesting a wide range of illegal substances, made me feel like I was in a safe space to enjoy my experience-enhancing substances. I convinced myself that in sympathetic Austin, inside Austin City Limits, I was safe.
I know better. I let my guard down. And that’s when they came for me.
After sharing a blunt with a group of Californian Chicano/Latino musicians who performed earlier that day, I said goodbye and stood back to watch BROCKHAMPTON’s critically rebellious, politically charged set as pillars of smoke billowed to the clouds from within the crowd. Besides the woman standing with me, I was the only black person in the immediate vicinity.
As a young white kid stumbled and fell into the gate to the right of me, blue eyes sunken into his skull like a Game of Thrones nightmare, one detective and five police officers from the Austin Police Department grabbed me. I initially pulled away from the strange looking festival-goers with iPhone earbuds in, but when they flashed their badges I complied and they forcibly hustled me into the nearby media area. They pushed past a confused, ogling security guard, marching me into a corner before pinning my arms behind my back, patting me down, running my ID, and searching my backpack.
In 10 seconds I went from enjoying BROCKHAMPTON rage against the machine to sitting with my arms pinned behind me, living in a personal nightmare of what happens to people with darker skin around the world on a daily basis.
“Why aren’t you helping that guy,” I asked, nodding to the drooling white kid passing out against the gate not ten yards away.
“We’re going after the big guns,” explained a bald, white officer as he ignored the nearly-unconscious festival-goer. “He’s probably just drinking too much. Now, who was that guy with the scorpion tattoo on his neck? Who was that group of people? What are y’all doing?”
I couldn’t believe it. “Really?” I retorted, “Those are artists! They played this morning!”
The blatant nature of this line of questioning surprised me. With the recent wave of opioid related deaths, the United States government made it explicitly clear that their priority was to “end the opioid crisis.”
Why then, did these officers walk past a young white kid clearly under the influence of a stronger sedative than alcohol to grab me, a black man smoking a blunt with a group of brown people? Why did these officers ignore every other person smoking weed in the area and grab me? They weren’t even trying to hide their motivations.
The answer became evident as the officers plied me with questions. They “didn’t want the little guy,” they wanted my help catching “the big fish.”
The officers thought the band I was speaking to was a syndicate of foreign drug dealers and I was making a deal with them. They are musicians from L.A. I am a writer from Houston.
The officers profiled the color of our skin and the types of tattoos on our bodies to differentiate us from the other people ingesting drugs and enjoying music all around us. They saw us passing around a blunt and bobbing to the music. We saw other people openly passing around ketamine and falling on the ground.
Based on my experiences, it seems to me like United States government is not as concerned with dealing with the “opioid crisis” as much as it is focused on continuing to disproportionately imprison black and brown people.
I told the officers to run my record. It’s clean and it came back that way. Their tone changed immediately as the lead detective balked, “Hey man, we’re gonna try and help you out here. You’re not a bad guy, we know that. We just need your help buddy.”
The officers told me that since my record was clean they would let me go- if I would help them catch the big guy who sold me drugs. They took my phone number, pulled my address, tried to hand me back my blunt full of weed, and told me they’d be in touch. Then, as a white friend of mine on duty with the festival’s production company stormed up and demanded to know what was going on, they let me go and disappeared as fast as they came.
My actions violated the laws of this country. That’s a fact.
Police treated me differently than thousands of people surrounding me and threatened my freedom because of the color of my skin. That’s a fact.
To my black and brown people living through this storm, keep your heads high and keep walking taller and stronger every day. If you’re white, you’re reading this, and you say you care, you’ll help us fix this now. Don’t tell me you’re sorry this happened to me and then post a cute selfie from the weekend. Tell me you’re angry. Tell me you understand that I have to act differently, think about different things, and lead a different life because of the beautiful color of my skin. Tell me that makes you sick.
Then show me what you’re going to do about it. Ask yourself how you can leverage your privilege to fix this. Speak. Post. Protest. Vote. Stop half-assing freedom.
If you care, show me.
America is the world’s greatest project in hypocrisy. A group of white men fought for freedom from other white men while exacting tyranny against anyone darker than them. But this goes beyond America. This has been happening in the world since people noticed they were different. One person celebrated. One got confused, and took action to divide and conquer based on that confusion.
This is a fight for survival for the celebrators against those who would act on their ignorance and erect walls between people. I celebrate with those who choose to celebrate their differences. I fight for those who would be free.
This is America. Stop ignoring what’s happening around you. Just because you can choose not to see it doesn’t mean it’s not adversely affecting the lives of millions of your countrymen, and countless more human beings around the world. Come fight with me.