Police profiling

I was born and raised in Healdsburg, and still spend most of my time here when I’m not attending college. In the past several months or so, I’ve become directly aware of a disturbing trend towards aggressive policing in this town.
Obviously, we don’t see East Bay-type situations here, with police riots (as in police, rioting), police executions, and undercovers pointing loaded guns at unarmed protestors (something I witnessed firsthand less than a month ago).
But the national trend towards hyper-agressive, paranoid policing (replete with military-grade weaponry and all manner of ridiculous new toys) that has resulted from the wars on Drugs and Terrorism and has accelerated since Occupy and especially since the Ferguson protests, is also evident here in Healdsburg.
In my entire life, my parents have been pulled over maybe five times while I was with them, never in Healdsburg. My dad tailgates and neither of them use their blinkers regularly. They regularly suffer from broken headlights and other mechanical failures and personal oversights, and usually drive above the speed limit. In my experience, everyone does. And yet I have been pulled over three times — just in Healdsburg and in the past six months — as well as once in Rohnert Park and once in Berkeley, both also within that timeframe. Prior to this, in the years immediately after getting my license, I was stopped twice.
Usually there’s a perfectly good reason: my tail lights cut out, or my headlights were off. But I’ve been stopped and asked if I was doing drugs just for pulling over to call a friend. And the only time I was stopped with a latino friend, I had three cops in three cars searching myself, my friend, and my car to serve a possession ticket for a gram of stems. The reason we were stopped? We parked at the end of Poppy Hill Road to drop off another friend after sunset.
I see cops driving around town now, constantly. I see them doubled up (remember when they had one cop per car?). I see their fancy new SUV and their Dodge Charger and their unmarked cars and I wonder why they have to spend our taxpayer money on new, unwarranted, nonstandard vehicles in an extremely safe, wealthy town.
But one thing that keeps nagging me is the fact that I drive a “latino car” — a 1988 Honda Accord with a couple dents in it. If I were driving a BMW like all the tourists and weekenders, would I be pulled over as often? Experience indicates otherwise, despite the fact that out-of-towners with fancy cars and lots of money are constantly driving around town drunk (which I think is worse than having a broken taillight). And the number of fix-it stops I get dragged into makes me wonder whether police are using this to target working-class locals who have more difficulty promptly fixing all their little problems.
What’s still more frightening is how police who probably assume I’m not white pull me over after profiling my vehicle and then behave extremely politely once they see me and decide I’m a responsible, middle-class white boy. I got two tickets from two traffic stops between my 16th and 19th birthdays. I got five warnings from five stops in the past year. The difference between how my vehicle is profiled, how (long-haired, sketchy-looking) 17-year-old me was profiled, and how I am profiled now that I look clean and am slightly older, is shocking.
The Healdsburg Police Department has gone on the offensive, creating an atmosphere of intimidation and harassment directed almost exclusively at young and working-class locals. Is this to reassure business owners and tourists that our town is safe for them to take over? The correlation between the dramatic escalation of gentrification and that of police harassment is too direct to be entirely coincidental.
Recent statistics show that 40 percent of home sales in Healdsburg are weekend or vacation homes for out-of towners. Most of downtown is filled with useless, obscenely expensive shops catering to tourists. There are hundreds of tasting rooms, $50- or $100-a-plate restaurants, upscale hotels, and now monstrosities like SHED and the Post Office redevelopment that cater exclusively to tourists. And I have friends who work in both tourist traps and affordable businesses, who say the wage difference is negligible, so these upscale businesses are in no way spreading the wealth around; in fact, the inflationary pressures they cause make their success a negative-sum-game for the rest of us.
I’m sure the upper-class parasites who run this town (and I think we all know who they are) are making a lot of money tearing our city down and selling it off to millionaires. The rest of us are SOL. This is Gentrification and it is here. Police harassment always goes hand in hand with projects of systemic thievery like this, but it is perhaps ! something that the less vulnerable communities in this city can ignore. However, when it is tied so directly to wider concerns in our community, only those who wish to participate in the dispossession of their neighbors and the destruction of their neighborhoods can ignore the disturbing reality of what our city has become.
Aaron Miller is a Healdsburg resident.