Three in the Morning
Names Redacted by Request
My former housemate Tim’s best friend from high school is a legendary DJ from one of Philadelphia’s seminal hip-hop bands who disappeared for a long time because he was in prison on drug-related charges. During that time, all of his equipment went out of date and his samples went into storage.
Upon release, the DJ cast about for awhile, not quite sure what to do with himself, until Tim heard him call in a request on the local hip-hop station. Recognizing his friend’s voice, he got the radio dj to put them in touch, and soon the two began working to resurrect the guy’s career. The two were working at my place at least two or three times a week last summer, and I’d often come home from the bar to see the guy crashed out on my sofa or on the floor in my son’s room. I wasn’t too thrilled about an ex-con in my house, but he was a nice enough guy (if sketchy), and besides, who the hell am I to judge a fellow musician who was in prison for what I consider a victimless crime: there is simply no defense of this country’s laws with regard to “illegal drugs”.
Things began to pick up for him pretty quickly. The DJ from the metal/hip-hop crossover band Linkin Park got in touch via a myspace page Tim set up for his friend, offering money and equipment to his inspiration. Offers began to come in from all over the place, including Germany, Belgium, and France. Magazines and newspapers began making interview requests. A lot of people believed that the DJ was dead, and his sudden reappearance caused a big stir.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t exactly left a lot of his habits behind. At one point he showed up at his parents’ former residence in Northeast Philadelphia at 3:00 AM or so and began banging on the door: the new occupants weren’t too thrilled and called the cops on him. Later, and more seriously, he got busted for violating the terms of his parole when he got caught in a park rolling a blunt. He was hauled off to the county clink for possession for a few weeks, and later released on his own recognizance, after which it seems he pretty much ignored his appointments with his parole officer and skipped out on his hearing. [My recollection of these unfortunate events are vague, as I heard them secondhand: any inaccuracy is unintentional.]
Once his career started moving again, the DJ spent less and less time at my house, which was fine with me. He’s a nice guy, but the felonious vibe made me more than a little uncomfortable. The year wore on, and Tim began making preparations to move out in April and May, as my girlfriend started working on moving in. The last I heard about his friend was that someone had flown him to Germany for a concert. That’s also about the time the letter from the parole board came. I never opened it, but made sure Tim knew about it. When I asked why the guy’s mail was coming to my house, the explanation was… well, I don’t exactly know what it was, except that it wasn’t anything to worry about.
At three this morning, it became something to worry about. We were awoken abruptly by my housemate Nelson knocking quietly but urgently at the bedroom door. “Brendan, wake up! Brendan! The cops are here, they have a warrant.”
“What?” I said as I sat upright in bed. “God fucking dammit, goddam fucking dammit dammit dammit.” I knew exactly what the police were looking for: I’d been through this rigamarole about a year after I bought the house in 2003, when the cops came looking (twice) for the previous owner’s brother, who was on the lam. I pulled on my boxers and a teeshirt and tromped down the stairs. There were five or six uniformed cops in bulletproof vests with warrant badges on my porch.
“Let me see the warrant,” I said. “I think I know who this is about.”
The cop, a short guy around 30 with bright blue eyes, pushed by me, illegally I believe since I hadn’t given him permission to enter, into the house. “I’ll show you the warrant when I’m inside.” He flipped open his clipboard. “You know this guy?” There on the paper staring back at me was the DJ.
“Yeah, I know him,” I sighed, and described the whole relationship with Tim. “He doesn’t live here, and hasn’t been here for months. He’s my former housemate’s friend.”
“Is your housemate still here?” the cop asked.
“No, I said ‘former’”, glancing at my girlfriend sitting nervously on the couch. “When my girlfriend moved in, Tim moved out.”
“He hasn’t been here for a month,”, she added.
Nelson and his girlfriend Mary came downstairs. Her dog, a pit bull named Lola, was barking in the backyard as the police fanned out through my house. “Don’t shoot my dog,” she begged. “Lola barks, but she’s a good dog.”
“We won’t shoot your dog ma’am,” the cop said. “Most of the time we don’t have to shoot the dog.”
“No, no, don’t shoot her, don’t shoot her!” the girl said. She looked like she was going to cry.
“Ma’am, we probably won’t have to shoot the dog,” the cop repeated. Probably won’t have to shoot the dog: that’s cold comfort at 3:00 AM when your house has been invaded by police with guns.
“So you have a warrant to search for the body, right?” I asked the cop, which he confirmed. Like I said, I’ve been through this before: a warrant to search for the body means that anything illicit unrelated to the person the cops are searching for is irrelevant. So if anyone was in possession of pot, for example, there’d be no penalty to pay since the cops were searching for a specific person.
Nelson was turning about three different shades of green all at once. Put aside the fact that his skin color is a deep brown, his English is deeply inflected with Spanish, and he’s a recent immigrant living in a country that’s getting a reputation for deporting people with such zeal that unfortunate mistakes happen, Nelson grew up in war-torn Nicaragua during the 1980s, a period when the US-funded Contras were murdering nuns and Jesuits in their fight to depose the duly elected Sandinista government. By the age of ten, he eyewitnessed more pure evil than most of us will ever see over the course of our entire lives.
The police spread out through the house and began searching for their quarry, who wasn’t there. Meanwhile the cop with the warrant began asking us questions to divine whether we were telling the truth, and telling us what a serious, heinous criminal this guy is, throwing out so many charges I wasn’t sure which were true and which weren’t. I knew about some of his problems with the law, but some of the charges were just bizarre. In this day and age, who’s going to trust a police officer or a prosecutor, of all people, to tell the truth? Not this guy: the police are not your friends, and they will manipulate, cajole, and outright lie to you to get what they want (I’ll post an ACLU video later about tactics the police use to get you to give up your own rights). It’s all a matter of statistics, of arrest numbers and quotas at the end of the day, and if a cop has to lie to get his numbers up, he will do just that, because even if the case is later dismissed in court, the cop will have still met his quota for the month. The fact that the guy pushed his way into my house already had pissed me off. I barely know Tim’s friend. I don’t know where he lives, who he hangs out with other than my former housemate, or anything like that. For that matter, I don’t know where my former housemate lives now, other than the general area of Bucks County, a pretty expansive plot of land. So I didn’t have too much to offer the policeman, who by this time had racked up a list of charges that made Ivan the Terrible look about as threatening as Big Bird.
“Anything else you can tell us?” the bright-eyed cop asked. “This guy is really bad, he’s wanted on a variety of charges.”
“Nothing else, Officer,” I said. “He’s my former housemate’s friend and I didn’t have many interactions with the guy. What time is it, anyway?”
The cop looked at his watch. “3:00 AM. We do this all the time,” he replied.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Three fucking AM. Great. Just fucking great…”
The cops finally returned from their fruitless search, and Bright Eyes gave us his card. “If you hear anything, give us a call,” he said. “We have to get this guy.” And then they left.
Three in the fucking morning. I guess I should be glad they didn’t kick down the front door, hover over our beds and wave guns in our faces: it’s not like they have to knock anymore. And I suppose I should thank my lucky stars that I didn’t get hauled off to jail for some trumped up reason.
But I don’t feel lucky. I feel violated, and I’m really angry at a number of people right now.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Jesus, dude. What’s up with the cops and your house?
June 26th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
history I guess. the previous owner’s brother, who lived there as caretaker before i bought the place, was also in trouble with the cops for drugs.
Remember all that paraphernalia we found when we cleaned the place? I’m surprised that dude still had a nose, all the coke he must have been doing. the cops coulda put out an APB: “Forty-ish African American male, husky build, bald head, missing a nose.”
June 26th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
jeez i’m traumatized just reading about it.
i never could even bear when a cop would stand next to me on the subway. their guns are big.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Yikes. Well, it sounded like you handled it very well. I think since they had a warrant they *were* allowed to enter even without being invited in. Have I shown you that ACLU video I have on “how to handle police encounters?” Everyone should see it.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Kate, please post a link as I’d like to see it too.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Yes, Kate, please post that link.
That’s some f’ed up, f’ed up stuff there, Skwire.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Kate’s right. They don’t have to get your permission to enter if they have a warrant. The knocking is generally a courtesy.
You did right. You survived the encounter without being arrested or assaulted.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
they don’t even have to knock anymore either. the SCOTUS, in a horribly misguided decision, sayus they can kick down the door.
And as I’ve written before, how’s that gonna work in places like Texas and Florida where they have “castle laws” that explicitly give homeowners the right to shoot first and ask questions later during a home invasion?
Johnny Drug Dealer will be able to tie up the courts by saying “I didn’t know he was a cop, I thought he was a burglar and started shooting”.
And in a worse case scenario, the cops are always busting down the wrong door, scaring the shit out of innocent old ladies instead of the perp two houses over. What happens when they make a mistake and the little old lady is armed?
It was [another] bad decision, and one that’s bad for the police themselves.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
hey y’all –
I found it on youTube, sent it to Brendan, and he’s posted it. I actually have an ooold fashioned vhs tape of it, and wasn’t even sure it was on youTube… but it was. I’ll reiterate my recommendation: parts of it are a little hokey, but it is DEFINITELY worth watching. I already knew a fair bit about the fourth amendment and police procedure, but I learned some very useful stuff watching it.
Remember, the most important words: “I do not consent to any searches.” Say it while looking into the windshield of the police car, if possible (in case they’re taping it).
If you like the video, Alex found this the other day:
https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/flex/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=2002
June 27th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
[...] will help you think twice about that “your home is your castle” junk. [...]
June 28th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
i got that video as this as a premium for giving to http://stopthedrugwar.org/ a few years ago. i think it’s still available through them.
essential watching.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
[...] the visit the police paid to my house at 3:00 AM two years ago? My former housemate Tim’s best friend from high school is a legendary DJ from one of [...]