He was a Ph.D. student in materials engineering at Northwestern University, which is nothing to sneeze at. But Lawrence Crosby had two strikes against him, one permanent and one by his choice of attire that evening. It was the old racist joke come to life, and a woman* saw a black man in a black hoodie getting into a car.** What else could it be but grand theft auto?
So a student is getting into his own car, and a vigilant woman sees something and says something, because she has no idea whether the car belongs to Crosby, but why not?
Thereupon, the Evanston, Illinois cops do their magic.
I was face down on the pavement. One police officer was kneeing me in the back, while others pulled or punched. They paid no attention to my screams identifying myself as an engineering PhD student at Northwestern University. They just kept punching. One shouted, “Stop resisting!”
Even in his retelling, Crosby goes light on what went so very wrong. It’s understandable that the police were aggressive and defensive approaching a potential car thief, but Crosby got out, put his hands up high and was thrown to the ground, while the cops simultaneously screamed at him to get to the ground. The physics don’t work that way.
And then things got bad.
“Stop resisting,” an officer yells as another strikes Crosby’s thigh.
“I’m cooperating. I’m cooperating,” Crosby replies.
This is cliche at this point, but always a police favorite.
He continues to explain that the car is his, where he got it from and when. He attends Northwestern and is a civil engineering PhD, he says. He was just trying to fix his car.
He asks the officers why he’s being handcuffed; they say they have to figure out who the car belongs to.
Cars are unusual in the sense that unlike other chattels, they have a registration showing who the owner is. It’s not hard to figure out, even for cops. The police can’t be blamed for ascertaining the owner of the car, having gotten the radio run of a stolen car, even if it was premised on racist assumptions, but the solution is to check the registration with Crosby’s license. Without use of force. Without cuffs. Without throwing Crosby to the ground, since he couldn’t have been more cooperative, at least at first.
They determine it’s his, but he was still arrested and charged with disobeying officers and resisting arrest.
Just because the cops stopped a guy for driving his own car doesn’t mean they’re going to let him get away with not being arrested. But that apparently was the Evanston police policy.
In Evanston, police say the officers who tackled Crosby were “in compliance with our procedures as it pertains to this type of situation,” according to Sgt. Dennis Leaks, who speaks before the video.
On the bright side, at least they didn’t kill Crosby for driving his own car in a hoodie. Crosby is suing the police, and will hopefully obtain compensation for what was done to him, but to the extent anyone doubts that there is a special place in cops’, and witnesses’, hearts for the assumption that black guys are criminals, Crosby’s experience shows otherwise.
Racism may not be the “answer” to all problems, but it remains very much a core assumption in crime, that black guys are assumed to be criminals and dangerous. And Lawrence Crosby just wanted to be left alone to drive his car and get his Ph.D. and not get killed along the way. That’s not much to ask, unless you’re a black guy in a black hoodie who used a metal bar to fix something on your car.
*The woman’s voice is heard on the 911 call, so it’s impossible to know with certainty her race. But to the extent it means anything, she “sounds” white. And based upon her erroneous assumption as to Crosby’s actions, it’s a fair assumption.
**The woman observed Crosby with a metal bar trying to fix a piece of molding on the car.
On that night in October 2015, Crosby was headed to Northwestern University, where he was studying for his doctoral degree in civil engineering.
But something was wrong with the molding on his car, so he pulled out a metal bar to try to fix the strip on the roof, he says on the video.
A woman passing by saw him — a black man, wearing a hoodie, with some kind of bar pressed up against a car.
The metal bar is the hook that will change the scenario from one of blatant racism to one of a possible reasonable observation of a concerned witness to a possible auto theft. Would the same assumptions have been made if the guy fixing his car was white and wore a suit? Or female? And yet she was concerned enough to follow him in her car, which Crosby realized presented a very dangerous situation for him.
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