“Back when he was prob’ly ten or eleven, he foun’ out this man I been datin’ had left me for another woman. He made this comedy rap battle song about him and sang it in front of everybody at the center. We was laughin’ so damn hard I nearly peed my pants. You know. He had it in his mind to be a rapper.”
Imani had met the boy when he was five years old through the family center where she worked as a social worker in the mornings. He had been brought in to see her shortly after his father killed his mother and the boy was handed over to the state. “I got a picture o’ him you can see,” Imani said, wanting to preserve some part of him further by helping Aria to put a face to the name.
But when Imani handed Aria the phone after scrolling through it, it wasn’t a picture on the screen. It was a news article. The man staring back at her was not a stranger, like she had expected. It was the face of Kendrik, the man who she had talked to once while they waited for the lunch service to begin. She had seen him many more times after that in passing. Aria felt sick to her stomach. “Oh my God, I know him … He comes here all the time. I even talked to him once,” Aria said.
“Police Fire 54 Shots, Report Finds It Reasonable,” the headline read. Aria continued reading. “It is unclear how many of those bullets struck Kendrik McCoy, a 22-year-old black man, but attorneys have said he was hit around 26 times. Police officers responded to a call about a man who had been threatening residents with a gun in Compton near West Piru Street. Officers say they saw the gun in the man’s pocket and believe that he was reaching for it when they threatened him with arrest. The shooting has set off demands by the community for police accountability and an independent investigation into the entire department’s training and an alleged pattern of racial profiling. City officials in April said they were inviting US Department of Justice mediators to hear from residents and create a ‘community engagement plan.’”
Aria continued to read the article until she reached the bottom. The first thought that she had was about his girlfriend at Foot Locker. The locks of his prison bars had yawned loose and promised him a life that was worth living for. He had lost that promise in an altercation that had lasted less than three minutes. Everything about it felt wrong. Imani was not alone now in her incapacity to digest it.
Kendrik had always imagined that if he were to get shot, it would be by a Cuzz – another Crip assigned to kill him for trying to leave the gang. Not wanting to leave the city, because he had a girlfriend now, he had been lying low and avoiding the parts of the city dominated by the Crips. The day the cops shot him, he had intentionally wandered into Compton, which was Blood territory. The Bloods were a rival gang to the one he had pledged himself to, but because he wore nothing to distinguish himself as a rival, he imagined that he would be safest “sleeping behind the cloak of the sloobs”. But Kendrik was recognized by a foot soldier for the Bloods, a low ranking member who was out “bleeding” (looking for new recruits to join the gang). Kendrik had crossed paths with the man during a conflict that occurred when a group of Bloods were selling narcotics in what Kendrik believed to be Crip territory. The man had parked his car to watch Kendrik, long enough to be sure that Kendrik was who he thought he was. He called a woman he knew and told her to call the police, to report that a man was waving a gun at people, and to describe him and give his location. It was a kind of a “slap back” at the insult of Kendrik daring to be there. He enjoyed the idea of the scare that getting hassled by the police would put into him. He did not imagine that the phone call he initiated would lead to Kendrik’s death.
Six police officers showed up at the scene. When they pulled up both behind and in front of Kendrik, he panicked. They yelled at him to get down on the floor. But while he was doing it, he reached into his pocket for the business card of his probation officer. Having been called to the scene of a man with a gun, they made the assumption when he reached into his pocket that he was reaching for a gun. That Kendrik was unarmed was a fact that they didn’t discover until after the first officer had unloaded two shots, the second had unloaded six, the third had unloaded five and the fourth had unloaded 12.
Kendrik didn’t trust the police. Policing was the most enduring aspect of the struggle for civil rights. It had always been a mechanism for racial control. Stories of police harassment and violence in the black communities where he grew up were common. The faces of the police officers he feared were faces that belonged to a larger system of inequality; inequality in the justice system, inequality in housing, inequality in employment, inequality in education and inequality in health care. Kendrik trusted his probation officer because, like Kendrik, Officer Kent was black. As a black man as well as a cop, Officer Kent had spent the last 15 years reconciling the warring perspectives within himself. As a black man, he had found himself on the receiving end of both profiling and discrimination more times than he could count.
