Free The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler Page B

There wasn’t.
    Nothing much seems to result from such complaints. Officers treat them like minor irritants, although when they’re introduced into evidence—as judges occasionally allow defense attorneys to do—they can discredit police witnesses, especially among black jurors from poor neighborhoods where they’ve seen cops in action. Neill had lost some convictions as a result, but he usually reacted with that standard police philosophy: “We’ll get him next time.”
    It was close to 10 p.m. when Neill folded up his laptop, took off the bright red Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt he was wearing, put on a uniform shirt, and walked out to the nearby parking lot, empty at this hour except for three marked cars and six officers hanging around waiting for him. Neill went off to get a squad car of his own, and we began with his favorite starting point, the alley between K and L Streets SW, which ran into a courtyard behind some two-story apartment buildings.
    As the officers swept in from two directions, the residents barely reacted, accustomed as they were to the invasions. It was a warm Wednesday, and lots of folks were outside, some sitting in tiny fenced-in patios or yards, a few girls looking pretty high while dancing to music from a boom box. The smell of pot was in the air. Neill frisked one young man, and the rest of the squad spent a few minutes sweeping the ground with the beams of their flashlights. They came up with a small potato-chip bag containing marijuana, but no owner. A man so huge he was oozing out of his folding chair caught Neill’s eye. “The big fat guy sold me drugs in 1994,” he told me, and they nodded politely to each other as the sergeant strode by.
    We headed toward Benning Road, and on the way I asked Neill what he thought people felt when he searched them and found nothing. “Relief,” he answered. “You’re not dealing with people who go to church.” But you are dealing with people who may get onto juries, I noted.
    On H Street and North Capitol, we came up behind a vehicle that seemed designed to command police attention: a dark sedan with tinted windows and plates that read “ RATBABY. ” Neill radioed the squad car ahead, which stopped and blocked him. Two black men were in the front seats, the driver chatting on a cell phone. Neill quickly had them out of the car and frisked. “I got nothing in there, so you can search it,” he later quoted the driver as saying. Nothing was found.
    Cruising into an alley off H and Sixth Streets NE, the lead squad car doused its lights. “We call it the stealth mode,” said Neill. “We ain’t supposed to do that.” He pulled up next to a gray sedan that was parked illegally, the driver sitting behind the wheel, which was secured with a locked antitheft bar.
    The parking violation gave Neill and his colleagues the legal hook they needed for an encounter, a gaze through the windows, a conversation that they always hoped would get them inside the car. So, a little charade began. The driver, a black man in his thirties, defended himself in tones of sincerity against the grave parking violation that had brought seven officers in four cars swooping down on him, mobilized to stamp out this parking scourge that afflicts back streets. He claimed that the car belonged to his mother, who lived in the row of houses along the alley. (A young black man under the siege of the gun squad often seems to think that he’ll inspire sympathy by noting that he has a mother—all the better if he can convince the officers that the little old lady who brought him into the world is actually the owner of the decal-covered SUV he’s driving, with beads swinging from the mirror and a woofer that sounds like the muffled thud of distant artillery when the tinted windows are closed.) “We always park right here,” the driver declared in a charming confession, as if his record as a serial parking offender would end the surreal scene. But Neill asked the man to get out