I recently posted an article about the conviction of former Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, for his perjury about the decades of torture of criminal suspects by him personally and his crew. In the article I spoke about the fact that this group of police officers — Burge’s “midnight crew” — would taunt those they tortured. Some of these detectives actually told a client of mine “who are they going to believe, a decorated officer like me or a n***** like you?”

Well this mantra — perhaps unspoken — haunts the lives of many of our citizens, particularly black men. They are stopped, frisked, and pulled over at an alarming rate — studies tell us that most of the time, for no reason. (See for example the study of eight square blocks in Bronzville Brooklyn where there were 52,000 stops in approximatly four years — but only six percent resulted in arrests.) Most stops by police officers do not result in finding a “bad guy”, but they do result in inconvenience, lost time, and humiliation to the person stopped or wrongly arrested; even if it’s “just” for a few hours or overnight. That is generally the reaction of those of us who know, due to our race or socioeconomic status, that it will not be us who get treated this way. There is virtually no recourse for bad stops and brief arrests — even if one is able to prove conclusively, that the arrest or stop was unconstitutional — which is very hard to do — there aren’t sufficient damages (like lost wages) to make it worth the expense of filing suit. Complaints to police departments themselves, go largely ignored and generally find in favor of the police officer.

That is because the question of whom to believe is nearly always what informs the decision makers, and the natural tendency is to believe the officer, not the person he stopped or arrested. To believe that the officer had good intentions and when a mistake was discovered, that he did what should have been done. So when Jacquelyn Carpenter and a male friend were arrested last Monday on suspicion that her friend had robbed a store, and that she was the getaway driver, that would have been the most likely result — that she would not be believed. Even though the police continued to question her after she asked for a lawyer, and even though they arrested her for a time despite the fact that the eyewitness came to the car and told the officers her friend wasn’t the robber, she was still detained. Handcuffed, taken to a police station, terrified and humiliated. Just one more black person treated that way — but hey, they didn’t charge either one of them so what is the big deal? Just a bump in the road, right? Well I ask you, how would you feel about spending six or twelve hours in a police lock-up?

But here is the thing — Ms. Carpenter happens not to be just any black woman, instead she is a 2003 magna cum laude graduate of Texas Southern University and a criminal defense lawyer. One with enough courage to tell the story of her humiliation and mistreatment publicly. So, this time, maybe the person arrested will be believed. Part of the reason she was treated as badly as she was, is that she tried to follow her own advice to clients — don’t answer the police questions without counsel. You never know how your words can be twisted, and innocence doesn’t matter. When she did that — when she refused to explain that she and her friend had bought bathing suits and were on their way to go swimming — that made the police more suspicious and angry. That meant that they took her in, despite the fact the eyewitness told them they had the wrong person. Her friend answered their questions, and that is what most people will do. Even if you know that it is dangerous to speak — innocent or not — resisting the pressure of armed officers pushing you to do it, is hard — it was hard for Ms. Carpenter who knows better. And this pressure is how we end up with wrongful convictions based on false confessions.

The fact is, police officers have a very difficult job to do, and we have to give them room to do it — but that room cannot be unlimited, it cannot be without consequences for treating someone, who is obviously innocent, badly for exercising their right to remain silent, and it cannot be that we pay no attention to the victims here simply because we do not think it could be us. When a recent study in Chicago showed that most of the complaints of brutality were against the same small percentage of police officers — and that nothing was done by the police department regarding these repeaters — this should be a clue; someone should act, and not just look at each complaint out of context.

Ms. Carpenter’s ordeal may allow “us” to reconsider, and to think, and to question. Perhaps we may come to understand that unchecked there is no “us” — separate from the bad guys — or potential bad guys it is okay to treat in this fashion. That soon enough it will be all of us. And maybe, just maybe, we will consider answering the question of who are “they” going to believe — so callously asked of my client at the hands of his torturers — differently. And if it does that, perhaps her ordeal was worth it — I don’t know Jacqueline Carpenter, but I believe she might say it was.