The events of this diary took place last September.
It was about 8:15 p.m. It was dark. It was raining. Not a gully washer, just a steady drizzle. Enough to make the pavement wet.
I was driving home from a dog obedience class, down southbound I-75 a few miles north of Detroit.
My small American Eskimo mix, Flynn, was on the passenger seat next to me.
I was in the right lane, driving a bit below the speed limit, as conditions warranted.
Then there was a loud, sickening clang/thump and my car started to spin.
A driver slightly behind me had hydroplaned (or so he said) into the rear driver’s side of my car, pushing me into a diagonal position. When my wheels got traction, I was propelled into the middle lane where I had to steer in a panic to avoid hitting other cars. Somehow, and I’m really not quite sure how, I managed to get control and steer to the shoulder. I was on top of an overpass.
The other car pulled up beside me and I was momentarily confused. It was a older, black Crown Victoria with a spotlight mounted on the passenger door. My first thought was, “The police are here already?” In retrospect, the other driver was probably either a plain clothes cop, or someone who had bought a retired cruiser at auction and had not done the required modifications to make the car not look like a police car.
The other driver pulled up ahead of me, just far enough that I couldn’t read his license plate. He walked back in the rain to my passenger side and I rolled down the window. I was a bit stunned and confused. I asked what happened, and he gave me the hydroplaning line. I asked for his insurance and contact information and he said, “Just a minute.” He walked back to his car and drove off.
The driving off is most significant because under Michigan’s no-fault insurance system, it meant I was going to have to pay the deductible on my collision insurance. That’s neither here nor there in relation to the point I’m moving toward. It just pisses me off — all these months later.
And there is a point to this story.
So, here I am on the shoulder of a freeway with cars whizzing by me. I got a grip and called 911. Then I started calling friends and family to tell them where I was.
A few minutes later, a Michigan State Police cruiser pulls up behind me. In the Detroit area, MSP has responsibility for patrolling the freeways.
Then, I hear the bullhorn. “GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
There were a lot of reasons for not getting out of the car. There were the cars whizzing by just to the left of me. There was the rain. There was the dark. But the actual reason I didn’t get out of the car was, I couldn’t. The side of my car was stove in. My door wouldn’t open.
The next moment: “GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR.”
I’m a 67-year-old, white woman. Not the sort who generally gets targeted by the police. But he hadn’t seen me. He didn’t know who was in the car. It was dark, so he might not have seen the damage to my car. But, on the other hand, I had placed a 911 call. So, I’m guessing he probably got a radio message about a distressed motorist at my location.
I may be a “woman of a certain age,” but I’m not a prude about swear words. I’m a Navy veteran. I spent 5 years in the service at the end of the Vietnam war, so I’ve had pretty good exposure to all those words. I even use them myself on occasion. But hearing that word from a police officer, in the dark, in the rain, while I was already shook up by the accident, chilled my blood.
If there been a way of my car at that moment, I would have been out in the rain.
“ROLL DOWN YOUR FUCKING WINDOW.”
I couldn’t do that either. The damage had disabled my driver side window. And I couldn’t slide over and get out on the passenger side. I have arthritis and my agility is limited. Later that night, I did have to get out on the passenger side. I had someone helping me and it took about 20 minutes.
For practical purposes, I was trapped in the car.
The state trooper got out of his car and approached my car on the passenger side. I rolled down the window (the passenger side still worked).
After he saw me, he relaxed and the rest of the encounter was pretty normal. I gave him my license and insurance card, he went back to his cruiser and ran them, then gave me an incident report number for my insurance company. The accident was 100% the other driver’s fault. My car was totaled and I got enough of a payout to buy a new car — with payments for the next five years. I wasn’t badly injured — just a bruise on my shoulder where I hit the side of the car during the impact.
But the point of this story is the word “fucking.”
It’s not as taboo as it was when I was young. An awful lot of people use it regularly these days. It has become the universal marker for high emotion. For some people, it conveys almost any type of emotion — joy, anger, fear. At times, I’ve joked about people who use fuck multiple times in the same sentence, as every part of speech.
If there is any moment in life when you really, really wish there was little or no emotion on display, it’s during an encounter with the police.
What made me think about this and made me remember my crash vividly is the story about the family brutalized by police after a child walked out of a dollar store with a doll. I’ve heard the recording. The encounter starts with the emotion meter turned up to 11. The police are inserting “fucking” into just about every sentence.
Two sentences: 1. GET OUT OF THE CAR. and 2. GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR. They mean the same thing, with the addition in the second case of “because I’m irrationally angry and might kill you.”
That word is making a bad situation worse. It has lost any original meaning. It just means EMOTION.
We’ve been talking about Black Lives Matter for years now. And it doesn’t feel like we’re making any progress. Every week it seems like there’s a new viral video of police brutalizing people of color. It feels to me like every one of those recordings seems to include police shouting the word “fucking.”
I’d like to see an experiment where police officers are prohibited from using that word. If they turn up on anyone’s video (body cam or bystanders) saying “fucking,” they have to pay a fine. I wonder if that split second of editing themselves might not lower the emotion level of encounters.
No, it’s not a magic bullet. This problem isn’t going away until police make some fundamental changes.
For myself, I think I’m going to try to edit myself. I’m going to try to stop using that word.