“Mommy, why’s that man lying on the ground?”
This is what my 4-year-old daughter asked the first time she saw Michael Brown’s body on a news show I was watching back in August.
“That body?” I stalled while fumbling with the remote to change the channel.
“Yeah, Mommy,” she said. “That man, he wasn’t moving. Was he okay?”
“He, uh,” I started to say as I flipped through channels and tried to come up with a G-rated explanation for the Brown story.
“Mommy, turn back to that channel,” she demanded after I stopped on a cooking show. “We need to see what happens to that man!”
“I know what happened,” I said. “That man on the ground was hurt. He was killed.”
“But by who, Mommy? And why didn’t that police officer standing on the street help him?”
I told her only part of the truth. I said that the man on the ground was shot by the police officer, but that it was an accident, and because it was an accident, the police officer didn’t know what to do.
We sat staring at the cooking show for some time before my daughter broke our silence: “Why are police officers so bad?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d asked this. She’d posed variations of this question dozens of times. And every time she asked, I struggled.
It started two summers ago after an incident with a police officer in a parking lot. She was with my husband that day. They were leaving a store, holding hands as they walked toward their car. A police car approached and waited for them to pass. They were halfway through a crosswalk, walking at our daughter’s normal pace, when the officer became upset. He started honking his horn and yelling about our daughter walking too slow. My husband apologized, picked up our daughter (who started crying hysterically) and continued walking to the car. The officer followed, arguing with my husband and even threatening jail time, before driving away.
My husband came home feeling a bit angry but mostly disappointed, confused and hurt. As minorities, we’re all too familiar with stories about police misconduct. But until that day, those stories weren’t his story.
He considered filing a report but, after weighing the seemingly unlikely odds in his favor, decided not to. He moved on.
But my daughter didn’t. When she saw officers, particularly white police officers like the one who argued with her dad, she started asking, “Are they angry?” and “Will they send Daddy to jail?”
“Police are the good guys,” I tried to reassure her after we saw Brown’s body on TV. I knew I sounded like one of those PSAs I saw in grade school. Those PSAs, and the kind of police they represented – blue-uniformed heroes with shiny, star-shaped badges – that’s the version I want my daughter to believe because it’s easy and less scary.
But her questions continued. And I realized it was going to take more than PSA talking points to resolve them. Recently, I’ve been telling her that police aren’t all so bad. But sometimes they do get it wrong. Sometimes, like everyone else, they make mistakes. Sometimes they unknowingly make judgments that affect how they treat people, and they do bad things based on those judgments.
This isn’t the neatly packaged “police – good guy” narrative I’ve long wanted. But it’s the truth that I think we both need. My daughter’s been asking fewer questions, and I’ve struggled less to answer them.
“Why do police carry guns, again?” she wanted to know when we saw an officer passing out candy at the mall.
“They carry guns to stop criminals who want to do bad things to innocent people,” I said.
“But what if they kill someone who is innocent?”
“Well, then that’s not right. That officer should get in trouble, don’t you think?”
She agreed and smiled at the officer smiling in her direction. “Would you like a chocolate?” he asked.
She looked at me, then back at him. She nodded and reached her hands out.
“Mommy, he was a nice policeman,” she said.
