On Thursday evening, March 8,
International Women�s Day, I was arrested by Evanston
police. This occurrence came on the heels of a controversial
article I wrote for which I received hate mail and death threats.
I was made to step out of my
car; my hands were cuffed behind my back as I stood in the dark street
with three young, piggish male officers. I was asked if I had 100 dollars
cash. Cars with people stopped at the nearest cross light were staring at me.
My person, my car and my purse were searched. I was asked if I had anything up
my crotch. I was placed in the suffocating back seat of a squad car and taken
to the Evanston police station.
As I was commandeered into a
holding area, my hands cuffed behind my back, I remembered this police station.
Twenty years ago I was the founder of a women�s shelter and a women�s
university program in Evanston and had occasion to work with police in that
building who knew little to nothing and cared less about victims of domestic
violence and sexual assault.
I was questioned as to whether I
take drugs. I consciously kept my dignity and said, no, do you? I was told
I thought I was �above the law� by a boy given deadly toys to protect his
master�s money and rules playing king of the traffic violations hill. For
further intimidation I was threatened with a strip search and a jail cell. My
husband bailed me out.
What was my crime? I had failed
to pay a speeding ticket in Kansas about a year ago and unknown to me my
license was suspended. There I was, a woman who had founded programs for women
and children in Evanston and has been teaching social justice at universities
and colleges for over 20 years in the USA, with three uniformed robo-boys
bereft of minds and hearts as they rummaged through my car stocked with
baby seats for grandkids and kid�s toys for my weekend birthday party with
my grandchildren. They put me in the back of the police car, my wrists
burning from the handcuffs, with my blood pressure soaring, unable to breathe
for the first minutes, struck down powerless against boys with guns and
handcuffs who said that they were only �following procedure.� I was instantly
criminalized because I had lost a ticket a year ago and had never
received notice in my move from one state to another.
If I had been arrested for
practicing my constitutional right to dissolve this present government, I
could have understood the situation, but this arrest was for the
capitalist crime of not paying $150 for driving my car too fast across this
infernal country. Debtor�s prisons are now one of the features of a police
state in which 2.5 million people are presently in the prison system
of the USA with over 60 percent of the people imprisoned for nonviolent
offenses.
In that instant, what I teach
became very real. My understanding of how each and every one of us is
criminalized in the USA increased tenfold. I hear my Black, Arab, Muslim, Red
and Brown students tell me they are stopped, harassed, shoved up and
searched against cars by the police on a routine basis in their
neighborhoods. I remember the battered woman and rape victim victimized by
the police. I see the political prisoners such as Dr. Sami al-Arian,
Leonard Peltier and Jose Padilla, tortured and tormented by their
captors. I see the Arab men with brown bags over their heads who are
forced out of their homes, disappeared and sexually humiliated as
I remember the boy cop looking me in the eyes and sneeringly
say, �Do you have anything up your crotch?�
The image of the Mexican
woman struggling across the border violently caught and marched off and
then raped in holding pens is in my mind as this arresting �officer
of the law� threatens to have me strip-searched and put in a cell. I recall the
three Arab women sitting in an Iraqi cell waiting to be killed by men trained
by US mercenaries and militaries, the people from New Orleans still held
captive in FEMA camps for the crime of being homeless after a flood, the
Canadian student arrested and strip-searched and held in a US prison just
this week for the crime of failing to stop at a stop sign, the
Palestinian teen waiting to cross an Israeli checkpoint and winds up
rotting in an Israeli jail.
I recall all of these and more
as I recall the empty eyes of the police as they tell me I am
under arrest. I realize yet again that I am the arrested and the
imprisoned and that they are me. I always have been them and they have always
been me.
In solidarity for the liberation
of the oppressed.
June Scorza Terpstra, Ph.D. is an activist educator and university
lecturer in Justice Studies and Criminal Justice. She is presently teaching
courses on Law and Terrorism, Social Justice and Resistance. She was the
founding director of the Evanston Northshore YWCA Shelter for Battered Women
and the Northwestern University Women�s Center. She is a former Community
Research Fellow and graduate of Loyola University Chicago.