I have been involved recently in an organized community response to the death of a black minor at the hands of a police officer. On Oct. 3 several friends of mine witnessed a young man get tased at and then run over by a Pensacola Police officer. The young man was 17 year old Brownsville native Victor Steen. By their accounts, what occurred was bizarrely reckless on the part of the cop. The Victor Steen tragedy seemed to have caught many people off guard. The Pensacola Police Department certainly did not foresee the negligence and recklessness of officer Jerald Ard. The Brownsville community and Sluggo’s patrons did not anticipate what happened that night either.
But neither the Brownsville community nor the Sluggo’s crowd were altogether shocked by what occurred. When I initially began to relay the accounts of what had happened to others, people were generally capable of finishing the story for me- not because they were familiar with this case but because it is representative of a broader trend within our society. As soon as I told people that a young man on a bike was targeted by a cop in Brownsville, people seem to instinctively know that the cop was white and that Steen was black. The common sentiment is that Steen was not pursued for any reason other than his race and class, indicating that this is an instance of profiling.
Officer Ard has said that he had seen Victor Steen at a construction site, and therefore designated him suspicious. But, as one mother put it while addressing the City Council on this issue, “There are construction sites littered throughout my neighborhood, and my son rides his bike near them regularly. What if a cop tries to stop him for it and he gets scared and runs... is this going to happen to him too?”
The Brownsville folks have perhaps been the least surprised of all, as many have come forward with their own personal anecdotes of extralegal run-ins with the police and stories of abuse of power. The name Ard has come up in some of these.
Perhaps it is for that reason that the Pensacola Police should not have been caught off guard when this tragedy occurred. Ard has been an officer here for only four years and has had
at least two substantiated complaints filed against him in that time for reasons related to abuse of power. During one instance that was never formally documented, Ard had pulled a man over for no reason at all. When asked what his name was, Ard first told the man that he did not have to give him that information and then made up a false name. When other senior officers arrived on the scene, the first words were “Ard, what did you do this time?” He has developed an unfavorable reputation that has functionally gone unchecked by the department.
The unspoken protocol that Ard was abiding by was to exploit the public’s lack of knowledge of their own rights, using antagonism and manipulation to lead the suspect into incriminating themselves.
As this has occurred within the context of the conservative South, many whites have come to the defense of the police officer. They hold that his actions were justified because the police should be taking preemptive actions to enforce the law in neighborhoods such as Brownsville. Essentially what that suggests is that Victor Steen was a legitimate target because he was a young black man living in a poor neighborhood. The proponents of this kind of ideology are entirely incapable of empathizing with people who live in communities such as Brownsville because their privileged status prevents them from ever experiencing the anxiety, despair, and paranoia that results from living in a virtual police state.
The point that I am trying to make here is that while people who saw what happened place the blame on Officer Ard, and many ignorant white people blindly assume that the police couldn't possibly do wrong and blame Victor Steen for not stopping, the bottom line for me is that the Pensacola Police knew that this cop was incompetent and left him on the streets regardless. Of course Ard should never police this city again and should certainly do time, but this tragedy is part of a larger trend and is only a statistical outlier in the respect that the people who saw what happened actually give a shit and Ard hasn't completely gotten away with it.
Rusty Black
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