New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Living with fear and rage in a tense time
Michael Jefferson II will never be able to forget the sight of a New Haven police officer, with gun drawn, approaching the car he was sitting in when he was 15.
“I just tried to stay calm,” recalled Jefferson II, now 26. “Because if you panic, you don’t think right and you could make the wrong decision.”
He had been taught this over and over again by his father, also named Michael Jefferson, a New Haven attorney and activist.
On the day when everything could have suddenly changed in his young life, Jefferson II was on his way to his writing class at the Educational Center for the Arts. He was scheduled to do a reading of his work.
Jefferson III sheepishly admitted to me that he and a couple of his friends in the car were sharing a marijuana cigarette. They were at a stoplight at the corner of Orange and Grove streets.
“It was a woman officer,” Jefferson II said. “This cop comes, weapon drawn, to
the window. I was in the passenger seat. The cop started harassing us over having the end of a roach.”
He knew what to say to the officer, as his dad had long anticipated that his son would be confronted with such a situation.
“I said, ‘My aunt is a detective; can I call her?’” He mentioned his aunt’s name.
“I also told her, ‘My father is a lawyer.’ He’s always told us to let the officer know that and to use my dad’s name.”
“That’s the only time a cop has pulled a gun on me,” Jefferson II said. “But there’s always that thought: ‘This could happen.’”
That realization — “This could happen” — is also always on the minds of his father and mother, Pamela Augustine-Jefferson.
When I asked Jefferson whether he worries that a dangerous encounter with the police might happen to Jefferson II or Jefferson’s other son, 23-year-old Malcolm, when they leave the house, he replied: “Every single day. Every single time. It’s in the back of my mind: ‘Please do not have a run-in with the police. Please do not get into a situation where the police are called.’ Other than a car accident, the police are my number one concern for the safety of my children.”
“These are good young men,” he said of his sons. “And in an instant that could all change.”
I had asked the two Jeffersons if they would meet with me at their home in the Beaver Hills neighborhood of New Haven to talk about how they’re feeling and doing in this time of heightened racial tensions over white police officers’ assaults on blacks nationwide.
My family has known the Jeffersons for many
years. My younger daughter was with Jefferson II in that ECA writing program and they became good friends.
Jefferson II is now a graduate student at Hunter College, majoring in creative writing. He showed me an essay, “The Fire This Time,” which he wrote recently. It begins: “I hope we are witnessing a catalyst for change. I hope those that have none, someday soon find empathy and understanding towards an oppressed people’s rage.” He closed by saying of today’s demonstrators: “They are essential, they are the echo of movements that precede them, people who take on tyrants, so all who suffocate beneath them, can someday breathe.”
As we sat in the Jeffersons’ pleasant, peaceful backyard last Thursday afternoon, those angry street protests that are rocking America seemed far away. But it was all we talked about.
Jefferson II said he had not yet participated in any of the New Haven protests but planned to go to Friday’s rally and march on the New Haven Green. His dad said he would go with him.
Jefferson II called the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police “an expected tragedy.” His father added: “We know there will be another one.”
I asked Jefferson whether he’s more nervous now than before Floyd’s death and the resulting racial tensions. He shook his head. “It’s just a way of life for us.”
But he was clearly shaken by the video of that brutal event.
“That’s one of the toughest videos I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Rodney King was
“All I ask is that black people be treated the same as white people. It’s very simple.”
tough” he said of that infamous beating by Los Angeles police in 1991. “But he lived. To see someone’s life snuffed out in front of you, with such callous disregard for another human being, is just awful.”
“That man was subdued,” Jefferson II said. “Why didn’t the other officers say: ‘Get off of him’? Why aren’t they challenging each other?”
Jefferson II said the New Haven Police Department should hire only New Haven residents. “You shouldn’t have somebody coming in from East Haven to be a cop here. They don’t know this community. Why should I trust that cop? He doesn’t know me. There’s an ignorance that becomes a risk. They’re scared. And when they panic, they make bad decisions.”
Jefferson said bias training should be done more frequently for police. He also said the Police Department’s Internal Affairs unit, which investigates complaints against police, should “hold police more accountable.”
“We need a really proreform police chief,” Jefferson said. “I think Chief (Otoniel) Reyes is torn. I think he’s a decent human being. But he wants to be loyal to the men and women who work under him. I honestly believe he wants to do the right thing. I hope he’s up to the challenge. Because lives are at stake.”
Both father and son are always trying to avoid any encounter with police. “For each interaction, just make sure it’s a good officer who can appreciate the situation and be more helpful than a hindrance,” Jefferson said.
When I asked how he could “make sure” of this, Jefferson replied: “That’s what you pray on.”
He said his dad was a police officer in New York City for 20 years. But he added, “I don’t want any interaction with a cop. I had a Hamden cop come up behind me the other day when I was turning onto Dixwell Avenue. The fact that he was behind me was unnerving. Any time an officer is behind a black man it’s unnerving. We feel we’re being profiled. That’s how we’re living. When you walk into a store you wonder, ‘Who’s going to follow me? Who’s going to disrespect me?’”
Jefferson quoted the writer James Baldwin: “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”
He recalled an incident several years ago when a motorist accidentally struck the brick wall bordering the backyard. “A cop showed up. When I arrived I started picking up one of the bricks and he threatened to arrest me for disturbing my own property. The ‘crime scene’ belonged to him. In a rude, ugly way he told me to get out of my own yard. I don’t think he would have handled Randy Beach the same way.”
“He didn’t change his tone until my neighbor called out: ‘Attorney Jefferson, are you OK?’ Why should I have to tell that cop I’m an attorney? I ought to be treated like anybody else.”
“All I ask is that black people be treated the same as white people. It’s very simple.”