Last summer, while casually lounging with my friends on a bench in Washington Square Park after a night of partying in New York’s East Village, I came face to face with three policemen hovering over us.
“What are you doing here?” one of them said.
“We are just sitting,” I said. It was the truth. Granted, we had probably partaken in a few slightly illegal activities throughout the night: underage drinking, a toke of a joint, and I suppose identity fraud if you want to get very technical. But now we were just sitting. Three girls chatting on a park bench can hardly even be considered loitering.
“Didn’t you see the sign? You can’t be here past midnight.”
“Sorry, we didn’t realize,” I said as earnestly as possible.
“Well you can tell to that to the judge. If you fail to show up in court by the given date, there will be a warrant out for your arrest.”
As the first cop smugly filled out my pink summons—the offence noted a “failure to obey sign”—the other two proceeded to fill out those for my companions. The following week, I schlepped myself down to the New York City Courthouse where I waited for hours and hours only to get the stamp of acquittal from a mindless bureaucrat. But as I sat in the massive room with all the other people who had—perhaps unfairly—been sentenced to a day at the courthouse for petty crimes and misdemeanors, I began to ponder what was suddenly taking place in my mind.
This was my first brush with the law, and as minor and silly as it was retrospectively was, it nonetheless left me sure that I never wanted to experience anything like it again. No longer did I look at police as my friendly neighbourhood protection, but instead walked quickly by, hoping they did not catch me in my latest “criminal” act. No longer did I feel, skipping through the city on a Sunday afternoon, that I was on the side of the law—that the police had nothing to do with, and were only there to protect, law-abiding citizens like me. In the words of Michel Foucault, I suddenly became a “delinquent.”
Although I knew there was no way I would actually be punished for this ridiculous non-crime, as I waited in that room I began to experience a lurching in the pit of my stomach as if I were a criminal awaiting the death sentence. The critical theory I had read in the classroom suddenly leapt off the pages and into my own reality. I had become acutely aware of Foucault’s obscure “Panopticon”—every act I engaged in was executed with utmost docility, in case some figure of authority was lurking around the bend. In the subsequent months, I counted my change several times before handing it to the cashier, waited for every green light (and nobody does that in New York), and even avoided going to bars until I actually turned 21.
It goes without saying that minority groups and illegal immigrants have long borne the burden of arbitrary policing and unjust state authority in ways that I, a middle-class white girl, can never begin to truly understand. It would be ignorant to pretend that my brief run-in with the law has given me any right to feel angry with my government, or to attend anti-police rallies. But I certainly now have a greater respect for groups like the ACLU that work to hedge laws like those passed last summer in Arizona, which suddenly turn innocent people into outsiders, enemies of the state and delinquents rather than fellow citizens of the world.
Sometimes it’s useful to jump off the ivory tower and into the school of life—to personalize arbitrary questions of authority and power into something rudimentary and practical. As a professor of mine once said, “You don’t have to explain the theory of communism to a factory worker.”
