What are you doing in the Hall?

by By Laurence Ashton/PoorNewsNetwork Youth in Media

" What are you doing in the hall?" A mechanical voice shot through the cavernous hall of Oakland Technical High School. It couldn't have been for me, I thought, I had a hall pass and wasn't causing no trouble for noone

"……did you hear me… what are doing in the hall?" And then it hit me , it was for me and this time it was accompanied the dreaded click click noise of police heels studded with metal tips for that almost like-a-gun sound.

"I have a pass," I turned around and faced two Oakland Police Officers who by this time were now fingering their guns and coming toward me, clicking in unison.

"Let me see it" They had reached me now and one of them was less than five inches away from my face"

I fumbled for my jacket pocket, as I did 'the other cop began whispering into his shoulder, "code… call for back-up"

Suddenly before my nervous hands could find the pass, I was against the wall and they were patting me down. Within seconds instead of weapons, they found the pass and after a short cough, one of them helped me up and said, "you should of spoke up sooner, next time keep your pass in your hand" With that, they both walked on down the hall ready to harass the next unsuspecting student who happened in their path.

Later that day I found out that the Oakland Police Department had been called on campus for "a disturbance" which turned out was nothing, so I figured just to make their day not a complete waste of time, they decided to get me on a casual WWB (Walking While Black) violation. But of course what they failed to differentiate was the fact that I wasn't just "walking" I was a 16 year High School student walking through The Halls of my school and, in my opinion, they had absolutely no right in there in the first place.

This disgusting experience, one of many I have encountered as young African Descendent male living in Amerikka, happened almost 3 years ago, and it all came back to me in living sickening color when my editor at PNN asked me to write about the proposed legislation Proposition Y, which aims to put at least 63 more cops on the streets in Oakland funding it with a new flat tax on Oakland homeowners.

Proposition Y will go on November's ballot because it was approved by a majority vote of the Oakland City Council, and instead of funding the already poverty stricken Oakland schools will direct 60 percent of the newly raised taxes to hire more police officers in Oakland.

Education Not Incarceration reported that just like in my case, cops don't prevent violence, they cause violence, they instigate problems where there aren't any. When there were less cops on Oakland's streets such as between 1995 - 1996 when there approximately 100 less cops on the streets, homicides decreased from 152 to 102 and a similar situation occurred from 1999 to 2000, when homicide rates decreased when the number of Oakland police officers decreased.

Those of us who deal on the frontline of racism and poverty have known all of this for a long time, in my case, not only is it my situation but my fathers' who is a houseless, mentally ill Black man. He lives homelessly in LA and the Bay Area and gets harassed, abused and profiled by cops every day. He doesn't get accepted into over-filled supportive housing or access to scarce mental health treatment just because he is arrested for sleeping in a park at night. And similarly, I don't get a better public education because I get harassed in my school's hall. Police don't get at the root causes of poverty and racism; they just make life harder for the poor folks and the folks of color unlucky enough to be on their radar screen that day.

Now I am not saying that all cops are bad, only most of them, but the idea that getting more cops will solve Oakland's' problems is just more Jerry Drowning of our scarce resources and services to supposedly make life better for scared rich folks who want to move foreward with the march towards a whiter, richer, more militarized Oakland.