I just learned what a "jump car" is. And I thought I knew most of the problems that people of color have with police, even if I live in a mostly white-privileged world. After all, I covered the police beat in St. Louis as a newspaper reporter for five and a half years two decades ago.
I was helping a friend, a young African-American single mother, move from transitional housing into an apartment. We had already coped with rigid rules about what containers she could bring into the transitional housing building to pack (no boxes), when she could move out (not on a weekend), and who could help her carry stuff (no one could go upstairs to help her carry stuff down). We'd loaded my husband's SUV to the rim with her stuff, only to realize we'd have to make a second trip. Well, OK.
So I took a route for the 10 miles or so from Wellston (near Ferguson) to south St. Louis that didn't go on the highway, because I couldn't see out of the back very well.
Her apartment is pretty close to my home -- in the area of South St. Louis with streets named after states and Indian tribes -- but I kept getting turned around. I made one wide right turn (starting to turn left and changing directions in the middle of the intersection) and then a wrong turn. So I pulled to the side of the street on the right and then turned into an alley on the left, backed up and turned around. And then I parked to start unloading. I asked her if I had pulled up enough to avoid a snow bank along the curb.
She replied that I was a little far from the curb and maybe I should get closer. I asked her why, because I was trying to give her a little dry spot so she wouldn't have to plunge into snow. Her answer was that maybe someone would sideswipe the car. I was parked in an unplowed lane, still at least 18 inches from the traffic lane with no snow. "This is fine," I said.
We got out and started unloading the car. It was only when we were driving back for the second load that she told me a "jump car" had followed us for several blocks before we stopped in front of her building.
See the rest below the fold.
We were not far from her apartment when we passed a car that had just been stopped by the police. I saw the usual flashing lights and three or four blue-uniformed cops, pulling the driver, an African-American man, out of the car. But I was concentrating on driving around the commotion on the narrow street and didn't see much more than that.
"It's the jump boys," my friend said. She spotted the female passenger, also African American, getting out of the car with a cigarette in her hand. "Oh, you're pregnant and you're still holding a blunt," she said. "I hope you're not too far along, because if you are, you're having your baby in jail."
She turned to me and said, "that was the jump car. I know it from when I lived here before. They followed us for several blocks before you stopped to unload."
"What? What's a jump car?" She explained that our neighborhood is targeted for priority policing, which includes unmarked cars patrolling the streets, looking for a reason to stop and search cars and arrest people.
"I guess I'm glad I didn't make an illegal u-turn," I said, knowing the only reason I didn't was that the street was a little too narrow and there was a car behind me. "Would they have stopped us if you had been driving?
She said that the police probably ran the plates on the SUV -- "Cars like yours, in this color, are often stolen," she said. When it wasn't listed as stolen, and when neither of the owners (my husband or I) had any warrants for unpaid traffic tickets (or anything more serious), and when I got out of the car and they saw I was an older white woman, they passed us by.
Half an hour later, they found someone else to jump out and arrest.
I know about the economic divide between middle class and poor. I have fought against the racial divide between black and white most of my life. But I didn't realize what a divide there is between people like me who can expect to be able to drive down the street, minding their own business and not be bothered, and people like my friend, who can't.