Unnecessary Force

South African marines stop a bicyclist near Cape Town during the state of emergency following the massacre at anti-apartheid protests in Sharpeville, 1960

Sleepless nights. Lost focus. Tears cried, or perhaps hidden beneath a mask of peers’ and parents’ expectations. What does psychic trauma cost a young Black boy in Uptown New Orleans?

I can only speculate, as a White man, once a White boy from a White neighborhood of Austin, Texas, so far away from Hollygrove in so many ways. I leave it up to trained child psychologists and social workers - especially those of Black experience who love on and care for Black children - to accurately diagnose and treat the traumas to which these children are subjected. I do know that each year, Tulane University spends $50,000 on each police officer it employs through the publicly-authorized, privately governed Tulane University Police Department, or TUPD.

And I know, because I saw it with my own two eyes, that on the night of Wednesday, November 17th at about 5:30 PM, eight TUPD officers detained four young Black boys bicycling through the Uptown campus’ Academic Quad. For an hour and a half these men and women – six uniformed, two ‘undercover’, three Black, five White, seven men, one woman, dressed in Tulane gear - kept these boys sitting on a brick wall while attempting to “verify” their claim to ownership of the bicycles they rode. These officers took the boys’ photographs and names, threatening jail and juvenile detention until a parent came to take them home. Explaining that they suspected the bikes may be stolen, the officers kept them when they released the children under “restrictive presence orders”.

These four boys are not allowed on Tulane’s campus again, or else they’d have to pay a fine. All this because, in one officer’s words, “we saw them riding these bikes that didn’t fit their body type,” an incredibly subjective judgment I do not believe would have been applied to a group of White children in the same location.  

Tulane’s campus stands on land which was for about a century the Foucher Plantation. Women, men and children of African descent, racialized as Black, were enslaved in the fields here. Human beings were systematically raped, plundered and robbed here, by people who needed to believe they were White, and by people racialized Black who saw their security and a measure of freedom in a position upholding institutionalized cruelty.

For another 80 years the institution named for Paul Tulane’s enslaving ass enforced a legal prohibition against Black students’ enrollment. A lawsuit brought by two Black women aspiring to higher training in social work, along with major foundations’ financial threats, opened the university’s doors to all in 1964.

Jim Crow lives on in the policies and practices of the TUPD as they prohibit the presence of Black children on the university’s campus on a pretext so thin it’s transparent. I, a whole adult, threw out the receipt to my bicycle the day I bought it five years ago. These children don’t have receipts to their bikes either. This is a case of racist profiling, cops armed with deadly force expressing through action who belongs, and who doesn’t, on the campus of an aspirational Ivy League university. This is not about bikes; this is a callous disregard for the precious childhood, the whole humanity, of these four boys.

As mainstream groups like the American Bar Association recognize, the institution of policing in the United States arose from slave patrols, the purpose of which was to keep Black people in their place. I am embarrassed, enraged, but not at all surprised that my alma mater and employer believes it is appropriate to enforce a sundown town in the heart of a Black city.  

How can a university justify spending millions of dollars a year on salaries of people whose job description includes traumatizing children and, quite frankly, doing the very thing they have baselessly accused those children of doing – stealing their bikes?

The TUPD are bullies weaponized with deadly force and minds warped by years of anti-Black racist conditioning. Fortunately there’s a path to healing. I invite any and all TUPD officer reading to quit your job. Resign and sign up for counseling. I don’t hate you; I hate the cop you’re forced to be. Find these children and prove to me you didn’t traumatize them, and I’ll change my mind.

Policing in the United States, in Louisiana, on this plantation ground, is an inherently anti-Black racist institution. No amount of diversity or implicit bias training, no community-oriented strategy, will fix this. After decades of failed attempts the futility of police reform is increasingly apparent. Only three years ago TUPD’s chief and key leadership resigned in a misconduct scandal including multiple police assaults on Black New Orleanians, several of which were covered up. Harassing, scaring and stealing from children does not make Tulane or New Orleans any safer. In any just world our care and concern would be for the safety and health of these boys who, I cannot stress enough, did nothing illegal, unless being a Black boy and riding a bike through Tulane’s campus is illegal.

What could we do with all the money Tulane spends traumatizing children? Counseling for these kids, and all others who’ve been similarly harmed. Tuition for them to attend Tulane, or any other institution they’d desire; who could blame them if the Green Wave wasn’t top of their list after such experiences? Invest in New Orleans public high schools’ college prep programs to dramatically raise the number of Black students on campus, while firing the faculty and staff whose abuse mars current and former Black students’ experiences. Create restorative justice healing circles for dispute resolution on campus and beyond. Do our part to establish New Orleans as a place of healing, not a place of unending trauma. What’s the cost to our humanity if we don’t?

Interested in the questions raised in this post? Read on:

‘In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering America’s Cities’, Davarian Baldwin

‘We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice’ by Mariame Kaba

‘A New Orleans Without Police’, by Jules Bentley, ANTIGRAVITY

‘Abolish TUPD erects art installation at future substation site’, by Rohan Goswami, The Tulane Hullabaloo

‘Carceral Architectures’, by Mabel O. Wilson, E-Flux Architecture