Occasionally my job requires me to deliver presentations or documents to a controlled access facility called The Navy Yard, referred to after this as The Yard. In order to gain access to this facility you need to have a NAVSEA badge with your name and picture on it. Nine times out of ten all you are required to do is flash your ID to the security guard and he will, without looking closely at all, wave you through the gate. Since The Yard is only a few blocks from where I work I walk instead of drive. I would say around 50% of the time there are active duty military personnel manning the entrance gate to The Yard and the other half of the time it is manned by Federal police officers. This particular day the ID’s were being checked by a Federal Officer. My job requires me to carry a couple of ID cards so I wear them around my neck and they are attached to a lanyard that has a string attached to it, much like a janitor’s keys, so if you were to pull the cards attached to the string it would snap back if you let it go.
I approach the front gate and show the officer my ID card and he pulls the string, almost to the end of spool, to get a better look at my card. He examines the front and the back and then lets the card go and it recoils as it should when you let it go under tension. I proceed to walk down the sidewalk to deliver my things and he says, “Hey, get back here.” I turn around to verify that he is talking to me and indeed he is. I walk back and he states, “You just snatched that ID out of my hand!” I respond, “No, it’s under tension so it snaps back if you let go of it the way you did.” To which he says, “Oh no, don’t you give me that, give me your badge.” I ask, “Why, what did I do wrong?” He snaps back, “Because I said so, I am a Federal police officer.” At this point it was clear to me he was one of the police officers that loved looking at his badge and abusing the power of his uniform. I asked again, “What did I do wrong?” and he repeated more than enough times that he was a Federal police officer and what I did wrong was not listen to him. At one point he even asked me, “Are you familiar with DC police code ___” to which I responded, “No.” He told me, “That requires you to listen to a Federal police officer.” I kept asking him what I did wrong for the next couple of minutes before the conversation heated up. The officer told me, “If you don’t give me your badge I will put you in cuffs and I will take you down.” Finally I thought to myself it wasn’t worth getting put in hand cuffs and I gave him my ID. After having my ID for a couple of minutes he ordered me to come into his cold weather shack so he could talk to me. He informed me, “I will talk, you will listen.” He then proceeded to tell me how I need to obey whatever a police officer tells me to do, that I am required to do so. I stared at him with a blank look on my face, not an objectionable face, just a blank stare while he lectured me on the rules I must follow. Afterwards he asked me for my drivers license, luckily I didn’t have it on me otherwise there would have been another struggle seeing how I didn’t drive to The Yard so there was no reason for him to have it. He asked me where I lived and I refused to give him that information and told him, “You don’t need to know my address.” So he asked me my work address and I told him since I was delivering stuff for work. He took down the name of my supervisor and our company’s security officer so he could call them and tell them what I had supposedly done wrong. When the officer was done talking to me and taking down the information he needed to I wanted to ask him a few questions but, as you can imagine, he was uncooperative. I asked him the name of his supervisor, his or her phone number, and how to pronounce his own last name. He gave me the first two pieces of information but he wouldn’t tell me how to pronounce his last name, rather he told me, “You have all the information you need, you are free to go.”
By the time I made the five minute walk back to my office he had already contacted my boss and he wanted to talk to me about what happened. I told my boss the story and he simply said, “well, it sounds like you ran into an asshole over there, if it happens again let me know and we will take it up the appropriate channels to deal with this.” I replied, “Actually, sir, it has happened before.” Approximately a month prior to this altercation the same police officer examined my badge, front and back, then gave it back to me. I looked at the back of the badge to see what he could be looking for and he sternly asked, “You got a problem?” and I said, “Excuse me?” and he asked again, “I said you got a problem?” and I replied, “Nope, sure don’t” and he ordered me to, “keep walkin’ then.” I asked him during his lecture if that was what the whole issue was about, the fact that he got in my face a month earlier and he told me he was not about degrading me or singling me out, funny coincidence I guess.
The lesson I have learned from this unfortunate event is that authority needs to be questioned. If there is anyone that should be transparent to the general population it’s the police, whether it be municipal, state, or federal. Citizens have a right to know what the police are doing and why they are doing it. In my opinion, that police officer owed it to me to tell me what I supposedly did wrong. The simple fact is he had no answer for my simple question because I didn’t do anything wrong. It would behoove people to find out what information is required of you to give to police officers when asked for it. The police are a crafty group of people and there are certain things you should think about when being questioned by a police officer. A good outline of these items can be found here . The next time you are walking and you see a police officer don’t be afraid to ask him or her, “Sir/Ma’am, if you were to tell me to give you my ID am I required to give it to you even though you have asked me for no apparent reason?” If they are a decent cop, and they may be few and far between, they will have no problems answering your questions. Police officers are certainly not above the law and in my opinion should be the most transparent organization the taxpayers fund.
No comments:
Post a Comment