These two stories are intended to provide opposing paths that the institution of the police could take in Charleston, though the implication is that they occur within the same timeline. The first is dystopian, the second is utopian.
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Woke up early again to light piercing through my blinds. Not sure what the point was to getting up at the crack of dawn; the checkpoints are always there, have always been there as far as my memory serves. Waking up to arrive early to the security checkpoint into the service sector is tantamount to waking up early to bang your head on a brick wall. Somehow, whether I awake for work at 6:00 or 9:00, I will be arriving there at 9:15. Perhaps they gained some mastery over time in the Expansion.
It is now 6:30 and I’m in the line to get to work. At the front of the sprawl of civilians are four officers: they are decked out in black and blue tactical armor, and the visors of their helmets are blurry and distorting. In the top right corner of their bulletproof vests are name-tags, but the names are blotted out like secrets in a government document. There is no way to know who you are presenting your workforce papers to, but you do know the roles. It is the Melian dialogue reduced to the individual level: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
A tank rolls down King Street past the blockade and suddenly I feel like I’m in Tiananmen Square. Up ahead there’s shouting. We all shuffle backwards and avert our eyes from the confrontation, everyone aware of where it was headed. Still, the faint echoes ricochet down the line and worm their way into my ear where they will doubtlessly remain through the night. I can’t help but look, and I see a black man not much older than myself being dragged off, his papers scattered on the ground. Probably some papers out of order. They’ll shake him down if he complies and remove him if he doesn’t. Though perhaps they thought he had some connection to the insurrection, though whether he was or wasn’t that would be what’s said on the nightly news. They would loop the footage of his beating or shooting over and over and analyze every movement of self-defense he made as an act of aggression. There are several each day – it occupies most of the news cycle.
It is now 9:15. I hand over my papers to the nearest officer, who looks at me through his grimy and scratched visor. I can make out pale flesh and that’s it. When he tells me to move along, it’s in an artificially deepened voice, the pitch-shifter in his throat rendering his tone inhuman. He jabs me with the end of his gun and I walk forward onto King just as the sky opens up. I try to duck underneath the awnings of the restaurants as I make my way down the street. At first there is nothing, but then there is a sudden wrench of anger in my gut. A sense of resistance has hit me. I pull out my cell phone and dial the numbers I’ve heard mythologized as deadlier than that of the Beast. But that’s just what those rumors were, myth, propaganda to scare off anybody from getting through the bureaucracy who were supposed to keep the police leashed.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“Hi, I’d like to lodge a complaint of an incident I witnessed this morning passing through the checkpoint.”
The pleasantness of the reply struck me. “Hold on one second, I’ll put you in touch with someone right away.” Hold music played and my hand tensed on my phone. This had been a terrible decision, what was I thinking? But no, the music stopped and there was the click of someone picking up. “Hello?” I said.
“We’re sorry, the number you have reached is no longer in service. Thank you.”
Behind me I heard jackboots slapping on wet concrete, a wailing siren, and felt the tip of a rifle in the small of my back.
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It was a quiet day on the job. Brook was strolling through her neighborhood, a region of downtown Charleston tucked away in the middle of the peninsula. The sidewalk was cracked and worn, but the neighborhood was vibrant and full of life, people on their way to class, the barbershop, King Street. People waved to her or greeted her as she walked past, and she would smile and reply in kind.
Brook had been elected eight months prior to serve as the head officer for this district. She was dressed casually, a dark blue polo shirt and some khaki pants. The only marks to distinguish her from the populace were a badge pinned to her right sleeve and a pair of handcuffs fastened to her hip. It was a stark contrast from the outfit of police decades prior, all black affairs coated in metal and plastic hoisting hefty military-grade weaponry; human faces buried beneath dehumanizing garb. Stripping away the uniform had been one of the first steps in the institution of the new policing program of Charleston. And it had been a good choice – even with the handcuffs, people saw the officers as part of just another occupation necessary to the function of the city, rather than an authority figure capable of brutalizing or abusing you at their whim without fear of repercussions. Of course, it also helped that the officers had been chosen for the people, by the people.
Not everything was solved by the institution of the new program. Some of the autonomous zones functioned well, but some of them were extraordinarily messy and had to be reabsorbed into the main program after only a short period of independence. Similarly, South Carolina’s domestic violence problem, though thankfully on the downturn, was still notable, and Brook had seen some troubling scenes over the past few months. But Brook would never know the awfulness of the old days; massive incarceration rates tied into a “War on Drugs” that pitted police and citizen against each other.
She would probably never have to watch a video of a fellow officer, gunning down a citizen as he fled because he couldn’t afford child support or excessive municipal violations, a story that had been lost in the years of the police state but had resurfaced when the historians did some digging post-revolution. Walter Scott had become an icon in the Charleston police force, a symbol of what the position must avoid lest they plunge back into the dark ages of the Expansion. Brook was particularly troubled by the abuse of power and monopoly on legitimate violence held by the police of just a few decades prior – her mother used to tell her about how her father, Brook’s grandfather, was one of the last people to be executed by the State before its overthrow. It had been what inspired Brook to be an officer – not to work out feelings of aggression or to live out a personal hero fantasy, but to redeem the title of “police officer” by treating people with dignity and respect.
No sooner had Brook stepped into her car, which was still marked as in the old days for practical purposes, than the radio crackled. “Hey, we’ve got reports of a rumble getting worked up down on the next street over from where you’re at. Think you could check it out?” She sighed.
“Sure, I can go de-escalate. I’ll be right over there.”