The concrete is cold on my left cheek, and the gas station lights interrupt the darkness of the night. I’m in Richmond, California with a law enforcement issued gun pointed directly at my open back.

The BART police officer is obviously nervous. He’s screaming at my friends and me like we’re deaf and dumb. “Get on the ground!”, “Shut the fuck up!”, “Don’t move!” are the routine phrases police like him use to feel like they’re in control of the situation at hand. We follow his orders like he’s our drill sergeant, although in our own minds we are heated and confused.

When a situation explodes to this life-threatening point, it doesn’t really matter why it’s happening—In this case; the police suspected we were in a stolen vehicle, which we weren’t. But what matters is, the officer has a gun and I don’t.

The gun he held was shaking as if he suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and I couldn’t keep my anxious eyes away from that perfect little hole at the end of the dark barrel. That deadly piece of metal was his protection against us—unarmed young people. And for some odd reason he seemed afraid, afraid enough to pull that trigger. 

This gloomy night in Richmond was definitely not the first time the police have pointed an inner city weapon of mass destruction in my direction. I have been “controlled” by a number of handguns, shotguns, and most frighteningly, the AR-15, a big black gun that resembles a handheld tank. Each gun-drawn encounter I’ve had with the police has been sparked for a different reason. I’ll admit, A couple times my childhood friends and i have gotten into mischief. But most of the time, the cops have come at me for absolutely no reason at all.

I was out of town in a world that seemed planets away when I first heard the cheerless news about Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old grocery store worker who was shot in the back and murdered by BART police. Tragically, it did not catch me by surprise. Over the years I have come to expect this type of horror, and sadly, I’ve grown almost numb to it. Oscar Grant was murdered on a brutal New Year’s morning around 2AM, about the exact time a few months earlier that BART police had me in the same position. I’m blessed to pull through unscarred. Oscar Grant was not as fortunate. Now, this unarmed, young black man has become the first Oakland homicide of 2009.

I could have easily predicted the street’s response—peaceful protests as well as broken windows, vandalized police cars, and burning trash cans. After being repeatedly mistreated and abused by the very same people who are supposed to protect us, this kind of frustration runs as deep as a thousand seas.

Now, when I see signs throughout Oakland that say, “I Am Oscar Grant,” I re-live my own encounters with city as well as BART police and think to myself, “Me too.”

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