A white woman finds out what a "jump car" is [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/04/1368574/-I-dodged-the-jump-car

We were not far from her apartment when we passed a car that had just been stopped by the police. I saw the usual flashing lights and three or four blue-uniformed cops, pulling the driver, an African-American man, out of the car. But I was concentrating on driving around the commotion on the narrow street and didn't see much more than that.

"It's the jump boys," my friend said. She spotted the female passenger, also African American, getting out of the car with a cigarette in her hand. "Oh, you're pregnant and you're still holding a blunt," she said. "I hope you're not too far along, because if you are, you're having your baby in jail."

She turned to me and said, "that was the jump car. I know it from when I lived here before. They followed us for several blocks before you stopped to unload."

"What? What's a jump car?" She explained that our neighborhood is targeted for priority policing, which includes unmarked cars patrolling the streets, looking for a reason to stop and search cars and arrest people.

"I guess I'm glad I didn't make an illegal u-turn," I said, knowing the only reason I didn't was that the street was a little too narrow and there was a car behind me. "Would they have stopped us if you had been driving?

She said that the police probably ran the plates on the SUV -- "Cars like yours, in this color, are often stolen," she said. When it wasn't listed as stolen, and when neither of the owners (my husband or I) had any warrants for unpaid traffic tickets (or anything more serious), and when I got out of the car and they saw I was an older white woman, they passed us by.

Half an hour later, they found someone else to jump out and arrest.

I know about the economic divide between middle class and poor. I have fought against the racial divide between black and white most of my life. But I didn't realize what a divide there is between people like me who can expect to be able to drive down the street, minding their own business and not be bothered, and people like my friend, who can't.