Over the last 19 years of my life I have had no serious encounter with the police. Of the most troubling to me are with the CUNY police (at times), but those encounters are over petty matters. For that reason, this post will be around a movie I recently watched that relates to Clyde’s articles.

What If?

Over the weekend I explored the possibility of a school shooting by watching “I’m not Ashamed”,which is a PureFlix movie. In it, a Christian girl struggling in life and growing in her faith fatally dies when two armed students shoot her. As later discussed, the armed students shot eleven other students and one teacher after shooting Rachel. Most of the movie is about the relationships that Rachel (the protagonist) has and the goals she tries to accomplish like spread the love of Jesus by talking to outcasts, forgive those who betrayed her and get a homeless young man off the streets. In a slightly cheesy movie with a heavy religious bias (conversion/faith and righteous living is pointed out as remarkable), that i would not elevate over other cliched Christian movies, except that the protagonist dies ¾ of the movie. Moreover, it would have little secular attention except that the much-dreaded event is the well-known Columbine High School Massacre and the main character is Rachel Joy Scott, now an inspiration to people all over the U.S.

The scenes that occurred before the massacre are chilling and real. The first chilling scene is when Eric and Dylan (2 shooters and Rachel’s classmates) are showing their homemade film to the class. In it they are shooting bad people on school grounds. The second scene is Rachel listening to the news that today (the day of the shooting) is Hitler’s birthday. “Creepy” is her response. The third is when she is in her theater class showing her teacher a sketch of a rose and thirteen tear drops that turn to blood. Rachel doesn’t know what those drops represent. Finally is the scene where the shooters are getting out of a car, waiting for the school to blow up. In this scene they shoot Rachel while she is talking with someone outside. They shoot her several times in the back and once in the head after asking if she believed in God.

Granted, these scenes and every scene in which the shooters are plotting is chilling. But what really gets me is the normality of Rachel’s life, the atmosphere of everything’s okay, that is portrayed within the movie. On the day of the massacre, like every other day, Rachel is shown getting dressed, saying bye to her mother, play-fighting with her brother in the car and attending school. The appearance of the shooters and Rachel’s sudden death was a stark contrast to the preceding scenes.

“I’m Not Ashamed” was chilling enough to give me a nightmare that night. And although it is a movie, it was based off real-life events and could have easily been the background to the Sandy Hook shooting, which I was old enough to hear about. In the end, what I question is whether the “stark contrast” in this movie is a truth. If a shooting or another such event were to occur on a subway or Grand Central Terminal, would I feel as uneasy as I did watching the movie?

Trailer for “I’m Not Ashamed”

An Encounter With the Police

Jessica Ng

My family and I have been mostly fortunate enough to avoid any spectacular incidents with the police. In fact, the only specific incident I can remember occurred when I was about maybe ten years old, when I was in the car with my parents, and my mother was driving. We were driving on a large road, when we were pulled over by the police. It turned out that my mother didn’t stop for a school bus’s stop sign. My mother thought that since she was driving two lanes away, she didn’t have to stop. (Actually, she was in the wrong by luckily, she was let off with a warning, and that was it.)

However, I think I can still remember the stress in that moment. We had no idea what we were doing wrong, and I remember checking if I had fastened in my seat belt, or wondering what was happening to us. In the moment the policeman talking to us, it seemed like every little thing was something that we might be in trouble for.

I respect the police force. I think they fulfill an important role in society. But I also think they hold a tremendous authority that in the wrong hands can be abused. In the light of many police-related incidents these past few years, I don’t think it’s wrong to have some transparency and oversight in the actions of policemen.

My earliest experience with police was in a classroom setting. “Officer D.A.R.E” lectured a classroom filled with my 8-year old peers and I on stranger danger, just saying no, and the danger of alcohol and drugs. I grew up in middle-to-upper class suburb of Pennsylvania best characterized by white picket fences and the children of white flight. I consistently saw this same police officer growing up and it was a bit of a shock seeing anyone else in blue in my town, which I don’t remember happening until high school (a younger officer walking around on Halloween).

When traveling, my interactions with police have always tended nearly comically towards benefit of the doubt, sometimes in dark contrast with those around me. I am female, visibly white, petite, articulate, wear glasses, walk with confidence, and tend to dress in collared shirts and vests. It would be a genuine challenge to appeal to societal biases and the police officers urge to protect a perceived vulnerable target more than I already do. I have never received a glare or warning at a protest, even when those around me have for identical actions. I have never been approached for loitering when waiting with backpacking gear even when my equally disheveled friends have. It is hard to list all the similar fringe examples, simply because I never noticed at the time. I have never been warned off for eating or yelling in a hotel, even when friends complain about the uptightness of security in a hotel. Airport security over the years I have been waved through with a kind warning for accidentally (sometimes accidentally) bringing in my carry-on: food, flint-and-tinder, a decomposing ram’s horn, a bottle of wine, wire cutters, a Swiss army knife, and water.

My experiences with security officers and police are more defined by what hasn’t happened than what has.

Recently the number of events causing tensions between the police and public has been increasing and inciting public outcry. There have been claims of police abusing their authority and discriminating against people on the streets. Videos of police arresting people have gone viral, with people commenting on whether or not it was justified and if too much force was used. Although general opinions towards police have declined, I personally have not had any overtly negative experiences with them.

I can count the number of interactions I have with the police in my whole life on two hands, but my parents interact with them on a more regular basis during their workday in the hospital. My mom is a nurse working in the emergency room and deals with all sorts of people over the course of a day. All sorts of incidents may occur with either patients or relations of patients which may require police intervention. On one occasion, a boyfriend of a woman seeking treatment threatened her. He said if anything went wrong or his girlfriend was not helped, it would be my mom’s fault and he would “get her” for it. My mom took it and calmly went to the hospital police right after to report the incident. They took this incident seriously and immediately went to have a talk with him, which led to him apologizing to my mom. There have been other incidents as well, in which patients have gotten violent and the hospital police had helped to restrain them. Overall, the hospital police my mom has encountered are generally helpful and willing to act.

As a white female who lives in a middle to upper class area, I have never had a scary or dangerous encounter with the police. But one time, I did have an interesting, even somewhat amusing encounter with them. It was this past summer during “Manhattan-henge” when the light from the sun was hitting the buildings of Manhattan in a pretty way, and my mom and I went outside to see it. As we walked towards 23rd street, we passed an area that seemed swamped with police. My mom was curious about what was going on, so she asked one of the policemen. He said they were just “hanging out”, there was nothing going on and we should just keep going. We did keep going, but we found the whole thing a little odd.

Later, after we had gone and taken pictures of the Manhattan-henge light, we found out there had been a protest right there where the police had been “hanging out”. In some ways, it seemed kind of funny to my mom and I that this policeman had straight up lied to us (and not very well at that) about something that really was not such a big deal. But it also goes to show that there is a lack of trust between the police and the communities they serve. Obviously, this isn’t the most dramatic example of this lack of trust. That specific policeman could have been at the end of his shift, ready to go home, and not wanting to explain this protest to some random person on the street. But that’s really the only experience I ever had with the police that sticks out to me.