The Night I Rode in the Police Command Car
I had spent years naming what the police did to us. I had never once considered that they were afraid too.
Part 2 of the “Activist to Pastor” series.
A word before this one. In Part 1 I told you the next installment would be about prophetic preaching and motivational leadership. It is still coming. But I felt led to tell you this story first. By the end you will understand why.
“They shot another unarmed Black man.” That was the message I received at my hotel while taking a few days off in Niagara Falls during the first year of my pastorate at First Baptist. The shooting happened in a city whose mayor was also new to his job. As the pastor of the largest Black church in the area, there was no doubt in my mind that I had to act.
But what would my role be? I left my brief getaway, and on the drive back to New Jersey I reflected on how I had previously responded to police violence as an activist.
In one case I had led a protest at city hall demanding that the officer who killed an unarmed teen be suspended without pay. He had been suspended, but he was still collecting a check every two weeks. My position was simple. If he was exonerated, he could always be paid retroactively after his trial. But if he was convicted, which he ultimately was, he could never be expected to reimburse the taxpayers for having paid a murderer. We won that case and the cop went to jail. We followed up with public hearings that we organized to document other incidents of police misconduct, which produced a report to the mayor and police commission with recommendations for training reform and increased accountability.
In another case I led a protest in front of a city hall that turned into a takeover of the mayor’s office. We promised to stay until the officer in the shooting was suspended without pay. After the second day of our sit-in, the police threatened the mayor that they would go on strike if he did not allow them to arrest me and the other protesters. When the mayor informed me, I called the major activists in the region and asked them to contact the mayor and promise to bring thousands of their followers to join us if anything happened to us. The mayor did not allow our arrest. We won that case too. And that cop was also convicted and sentenced to jail time.
That was Rev. Buster Soaries, the activist. Now I was Rev. Dr. DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., pastor of the largest church in the region, married with two children, twelve years older and still committed to justice. But now I would respond differently than I had in the past.
First, I met with the family and friends of the victim to offer my condolences and the sanctuary of our church for the funeral if they needed it. Then I met with the youth of the neighborhood who had begun gathering to plan a response to the shooting. These young people were not products of the southern, church based, nonviolent civil rights movement. They believed they would not be taken seriously unless they retaliated by shooting up a police car that night to kill a police officer. They showed me their guns. I believed them.
They were respectful toward me, and they thanked me for meeting with them. I left with a sense of frustration and fear. I tried to reach the mayor to work out a strategy to keep the city from going up in flames. He was nowhere to be found. The city was on the edge of an explosion, and the one man elected to lead it offered no leadership at all. Whatever was going to hold that night together, it was not going to come from city hall.
So I did the only thing I could think of that might get us through the night without violence. I rode in the command car of the police department, and I had word spread through the neighborhood that I was in a police car, so no one would shoot at a car and risk killing me while trying to kill a cop. In Part 1 I wrote that the activist agitates from outside the room and the pastor is responsible for the people inside the room. That night I went all the way inside. I had spent my activist years on one side of the police line. I had never seen policing from the inside.
From the command car I could monitor the night in real time over the police radio. I could also hear the fear among the officers as they talked with their leaders, uncertain about what was coming. I had spent years naming what the police did to us. I had never once considered that they were afraid too. On a night like that one, the fear in that car was as real as the fear in the neighborhood. Seeing it did not excuse anything, but it changed me. And there was no violence that night at all.
We held the funeral for the victim at First Baptist. In my eulogy I tried to convince the hundreds of young people in the room to honor him by letting us help them build successful lives. A couple of dozen kids accepted our invitation to leave their guns at the church before they left. We collected two dozen guns.
A few days later I took a group of neighborhood youth to the state capital to visit that city’s Black mayor and hear him describe what it is like to be Black and hold political power. They had never seen or met a Black mayor. Their eyes and their minds opened to a way to shape public policy, and even police behavior, other than violence.
We then started a program for neighborhood youth that helped almost all of them grow into successful, responsible men. College graduates, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and church leaders. One of those young men opened his own barbershop across the street from our church. He became my barber.
Stay tuned for “Activist to Pastor,” Part 3.