Getting along
by Jon Worley

Driving along last night in south St. Pete, I saw an 80-something Buick driven by a young black man sitting in the left-hand turn lane. Behind him was a St. Pete police car, lights flashing. The light changed, and the Buick turned left and then right into an empty parking lot, never moving more than five miles per hour. A routine traffic stop, see them all the time. And then a couple cops in a car pulled up beside me. I looked over at the driver, but he didn't see me, instead noticing the activity in the parking lot.

He did not pick up his radio to acknowledge a call. He did not move along and let his fellow officers take care of business. No, he raced forward, flashed on his lights and pulled in to the parking lot. The thin blue line became a bit thicker; the heel of the law got a little heavier.

They just don't get it, do they?

Getting pulled by one cop car is bad enough. But the anxiety and paranoia are indeed doubled when another shows up. It is not uncommon in south St. Pete for three or even four police cars to take part in a routine traffic stop. Many of the times I later checked police ticker: In all cases I checked, the stop was just for speeding or some similar civil driving offense. Nothing criminal. The other common factor was that each driver pulled over was black, just like the young man last night.

This intimidation is so subtle that many white folks just don't understand. Being a white guy with hair that reaches much closer to my ass than my shoulders, I've had my share of police harrassment. Every black person I know in St. Pete has a story of police harrasment. And before you think this stuff is trivial, listen.

One friend of mine was handcuffed, taken down to the police station and fingerprinted, ostensibly because her tags were expired. Except that this occurred on the second of the month, and tags don't expire until the fifth. The police didn't even have cause to give her a ticket (a civil offense which wouldn't require handcuffs or fingerprints in any case).

Another ran out of gas on her way to work. Instead of giving her a lift to the closest gas station, the police hassled her for 45 minutes, questioning her ownership of the car, registration, insurance and anything else they could think of. Of course, she eventually passed muster.

By contrast, take my wife. She is white, and drives an 87 Chevy Nova. A few months ago, her timing belt broke while she was waiting for a light in the middle northbound lane of a six-lane U.S. highway, the busiest road in our county. Flustered, she locked her keys in the car as well.

Did the cop bust her for some minor offense, or even give her a hard time? No. He was helpful, even offering her a phone to call a repairman. He calmed her down, doing what police are supposed to do: serve. Would this same police officer have done the same for a black motorist in such a position? I'd like to think so. But incidents like the ones detailed earlier make me wonder.

Last week in St. Pete, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros stood in front of the mayor and city council and said, "Get real." He was one step away from calling them and the police department a bunch of racist bastards, and instead merely said the racial climate in south St. Pete is "the worst I've seen in any southern city since the 60s."

As far as the people in authority are concerned, he's dead right. I've taken down names, and I'm not voting for any of these people again (and as we still have the old segregationist voting methods, all city council positions are voted citywide). Well, I didn't vote for them in the first place, but I'm working my ass off now to get them out. And if they won't fire the police chief, I think it's time for some old-time civil disobedience.

But as for relations between white folks and black folks in general, well, stuff's not awful. I live in south St. Pete, and people are as friendly as ever. Black, white, in-between and otherwise. I wave and they wave back. I say hi and they respond cheerily. Now, I'm sure it helps that the vast majority of southsiders, black and white alike, are bonded by a high suspicion of the police. And it's not that hard to tell the difference between a white who lives on the southside, and one from up north. I get it right over 95 percent of the time.

Not eveything the police have done in the past two years has been bad. But while the community policing initiative has been effective (and our neighboorhood's cop is highly respected by both black and white residents), problems lie with cops with a more unspecified duty, like the officers involved in the Tyron Lewis shooting.

In short, the people down here can get along. One of the reasons I live where I do is that folks of all shapes, colors, philosophies, economic backgrounds and sexual orientations live here. And we all get along, for the most part. As much as is probably humanly possible, anyway.

But the power structure in our city is flawed, and the people in charge are flawed even more. Without the city (literally) fathers realizing it, St. Petersburg has changed from a sleepy vacation resort to a real urban center. The median age (of the city, though not the county) has dropped below the national average. And when legal realty segregation went away, by and large the middle and upper-class black families moved out of south central St. Pete, leaving the area economically and socially distressed.

Change won't come easily, but it has to come. My city needs new ideas and a fresh set of priorities. A few panacea dollars from HUD won't help much, but perhaps Secretary Cisneros' words will spur some action on the part of our city's leadership. At this point, any new idea is better than the ones that have already failed.

And if change isn't forthcoming from this crop of leaders, we have an election early next year. I'm already working to effect a revolution through the ballot box. Nothing would give me more satisfaction.

The most common cargo leaving the St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport is filled coffins. Jon Worley is busy registering corpses to vote before they get shipped back from whence they came.

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