Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks

Author:Rosa Brooks [Brooks, Rosa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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All over Washington, it sometimes seemed, there were girls whose mothers wanted them arrested, and girls whose mothers wanted nothing to do with them.

I thought of my own mother, whose disapproval still rankled. But I was lucky, so undeservedly lucky: even during those painful years before I left for college, when our house felt like a prison, each of us trapped in separate, solitary cells, I never doubted my mother’s love for me. The prison bars I chafed against as a teenager were constructed from my own emotions, not from cold, hard metal.

On another evening in the spring of 2017, I was patrolling with an officer called Reid, a self-declared Second Amendment nut. (“I’m a single issue voter,” he informed me. “And my issue is gun rights.”) Reid collected weapons, and in his spare time, he took every commercially available course on defensive tactics, room clearing, and active-shooter situations. He never allowed his two young sons to enter a store or restaurant without first determining all exit locations and looking through the windows to determine the position and threat posture of all occupants, he told me earnestly: “I want tactical room entry to be second nature to them.”

To his credit, Reid took his role as my ad hoc training officer seriously. He spent an hour drilling me on safe traffic stop tactics and another hour showing me the websites of training schools where I could further my tactical education. He was delighted to have a law professor as his partner, and spent another hour offering an explication of the drafting history of the Second Amendment, an exercise that only ended when we were called to an assault in progress.

Lights flashing and sirens blaring, I drove to the scene Code 1, under Reid’s watchful eye. When we arrived a minute or two later, we were greeted at the apartment’s outer door by a tearful woman in a black T-shirt.

“I need you to take my daughter before I kill her. I’m serious, she’s breaking up my shit, swinging on me . . .”

She sat down on the stairwell, put her head in her hands, and started crying.

“She mad, she keep asking my boyfriend for money, calling me, ‘Fuck you, bitch!’” She shook her head. “I’m like, ‘Get the hell out of my house, now!’”

Reid told me to interview her while he went to the apartment to talk to the daughter. “It’s unlocked,” the mother called after him. “Just go in.”

I stayed out on the landing, trying to get the details: Who, what, why, when, where, how?

She gave me the basics, but mostly just sat there crying, holding her head, defeat plain on her face.

“I can’t even think. She slamming my lamps, breaking my lamps, biting me, breaking up shit in my house, breaking my fan.”

She took a gulp of air and looked up at me. “She need to learn. I want her to go to jail. I want her to be in some type of home. I don’t even have custody of her; my mother did.

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