"We're on a Patrol"

and the Eloquence of Material


As I was walking east on 44th Street to my bus stop after seeing a play on Broadway, I felt a man's footsteps behind me. I felt them measured to mine. I looked at him in a window to my left. Black coat, almost no hair. The street was fairly deserted but up ahead there was a crowd. I decided to let the crowd slow me and let the guy pass. As I came to the crowd, which was by a theater, I walked almost right into some people and almost stopped. The guy passed. As I was stopped, I noticed that there were four policemen in a row by some of the doors to the theater. Two were joking with each other, the third texted. These were some of the most cheerful looking on-duty policemen I had ever seen. Then I saw they all were armed with not just the traditional handgun at the hip but with M16s. (On closer look, they looked like M4 assault rifles, but I didn't care to talk guns with the big men.) Two German Shepherds sat at their feet looking friendly. And big. I walked by seeing that there were some celebrities getting out of the theater and people asking for their autographs.

Then, a ways further down the street I noticed an NYPD van. A buxom African-American woman officer with dreads under her police hat text messaged with a smile on her face. --on second thought, any one of those officers could have been described as buxom because of the fact that they were all wearing huge bulletproof vests above their clothes.-- A white officer kept his eyes open. Near both of their hips dangled M16s. I walked by, wanting to get as far away as possible from the weapons. Anybody who had one, could use it. But then, I was curious, so I turned around and asked the white guy, whose eye I caught, "Hello Officer!" I said. For a moment I had the impression he only wanted to answer in monotones. "What's the event?"

"Just doing a patrol," he answered. Patrol my foot!

"Thank you!" I answered. If he hadn't had the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle dangling around his hips, I might have asked him why the fancy jewelry, why the dogs? But he was the one with the fancy jewelry, and I had none I could shoot him back with, so I didn't care to ask. It is funny, I can generally strike up a conversation with a police officer when I'm curious about an unusual police presence somewhere but the semi-automatic rifles, communicated something entirely different than a pistol in its holster.

Members of the M16 family are too big to have holsters. It is impossible to put them away. Whereas the barrel of a handgun can be kept out of sight (although very handy) the M16's barrel is always out--in view. Because of its size and the fact that it fires in bursts, an M16 communicates that it will kill with reckless teenage boy energy, whereas a handgun says that it will choose a target and fire. When I see the results of an M16, I see bullet-freckled faces of Jenin houses. I see the results of a handgun as the killing of the unarmed Oscar Grant at an Oakland BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. I see handgun violence as a rapid, directed act of killing against certain people--who are always in groups defined by race, culture, and class that I do not fit into--while an M16's violence is to anyone and everyone who comes near it. That is why it scares me more. That is why it shuts me up. I hate the M16.