Here's what happened when I made Tennessee cops mad and they put me in jail.

It was a beautiful summer night in Memphis, Tennessee. I was walking back to my AirBnB after an event celebrating Tyre Nichols’ birthday, a young Black man killed by police in January. 

At the event, families of victims of police brutality spoke. Ben Crump, who is representing Nichols’ family, spoke. Adorable kids in sunglasses did a dance. A bigger dance party ensued, leading with Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick, Push,” the classic ode to freewheeling skateboarders, as Nichols had been (“Just the freedom was better than breathing they said... Kick … push …. coaaast…”) before he was beaten to death by the Memphis police.

I was walking down a main drag when I saw a man in the back of a police car. He was in distress, panicking and pounding at the window. I approached to see if he was OK. A woman officer yelled at me to get away from the police car.

When I took out my phone to film, the other officers started yelling at me about interfering with a police investigation. There was nothing like, say, a corpse or visible victim in the vicinity, so I couldn’t quite suss out what they were investigating.

“What’s the alleged crime?” I asked. 

“How lacking in intelligence are you?!” the woman cop yelled at me in response. 

“If you don’t leave you’ll be in the back of a police car just like him!” another officer said. They put out police tape. I made sure to stand behind it, but they kept yelling at me to leave. I pointed out that I was standing on a public sidewalk. “You’re harassing us! Every minute we spend talking to you is time spent away from our investigation!” the woman cop huffed. 

Look, I get that I’m annoying. But that’s not a crime. Even aggressive NYPD cops mostly ignore hecklers and people filming. The Memphis PD officers could have ignored my questions while pursuing their “investigation.” 

Instead, they told me I had seconds to leave or get arrested. “Are you kidding? Based on what?” I asked.  “I’m a reporter,” I added (as if that ingratiates you with people). 

“Where’s your press pass?” a male officer barked at me. 

“It’s not on me.”  

“You’re not a reporter and you’re committing criminal impersonation,” he said. “Criminal impersonation!” 

He told me I had three seconds to leave or he’d arrest me. He started jangling his handcuffs at me. (“That would have been a good time to leave,” a lawyer friend told me when he watched the video). Instead I was like, “Really? You’re going to arrest me for standing on a public sidewalk?” And well, the officer shoved me around and handcuffed me so tight my wrists and forearms are still bruised.

I sat in the back of the police car, craning to watch as they dumped the contents of my backpack onto the trunk (so pressing was the original “investigation” that the officers stopped it to rifle through my stuff). One officer found my cigarettes and just threw them on the street. I had a pill bottle with two small weed gummies in it, acquired legally in New York. 

Oh, how their faces lit up with joy when they found the microdose of marijuana. “It’s legal in New York!” I protested. “You’re not in New York now, you’re in Tennessee,” they retorted with smirks. 

The arresting officer took me to an ER because I had a scratch on my leg (acquired earlier when the “Kick, Push” song inspired me to revisit my youth and borrow a skateboard from some kids in the park—I promptly fell on my ass and scratched up my ankle. It was embarrassing but certainly not a serious injury. Yet, the arresting cop and I spent an interminable amount of time in an ER, watching people in states of near-death shout in agony. 

“Dude. I don’t need this! Why are we taking up the doctors’ time?” I asked the cop. 

“It’s protocol.”  

Then I started crying. For sympathy, but also, the handcuffs were agonizingly painful and my dress straps kept falling off, and I couldn’t fix them with my hands behind my back, and my hair was matted to my face and I couldn’t pull it back. 

After some looks from hospital staff, the officer slightly loosened the handcuffs. When he got sick of my whining about how I couldn’t push my hair out of my face, he handcuffed me in front. I said I needed some water and took a step to ask for it. The cop responded by grabbing my arm and slamming me down on my back into a cot. It was a bit scary. It seemed like he was careful to not crack my skull open, but still, it was unnecessary.

“What the fuck are you worried about? I’m handcuffed and 1/20th of your size!” I sassed.

“Rules are rules,” he retorted. “You should have thought about it before interfering in a police investigation.”

A doctor finally saw me, put some neosporin on my tiny scratch, slapped a band-aid on it, and the cop and I went off to Shelby County East jail for women.

It looks like all jails: brick, barbed wire, slits for windows because criminal suspects can’t be trusted with real windows, I guess. The inside of booking had DMV vibe (depressing and you know you’ll be there for eternity and if you complain punishment is swiftly administered).

They told me I could access my phone to write down five numbers that I could call on the jail phone. As I scrolled through my contacts, my stupid IPhone looked at me with insouciance and promptly died. 

“Please can I charge it to get the numbers?” I begged.

“NO!” the jail staff yelled in outrage, as if I were demanding some extreme luxury. Like everyone under 80, I don’t know any numbers but that of my childhood home, so after intake I called my parents in California and it rang and rang and no one picked up. Look, I have the kind of over-protective, neurotic parents, who upon getting a collect call saying, “Hi Mom, I’m in jail in Memphis” my mother would have 5 heart attacks and immediately catch a red-eye to come help. The vibe I got from staff though, was that as an accused criminal, I had no one in my life who would pick up a collect call from me. Usually, my white girl look gets me out of most things, but I suspect that because I’m skinny, in jail in the South, I clocked in as a meth head \_(ツ)_/. 

So, between midnight and 9:30 in the morning, I sat in a hard plastic chair trying to sleep, intermittently attempting to phone my parents. I couldn’t sleep because everytime I positioned my legs in the chair, someone barked, “Ganeva! Feet on the ground!” 

There was a TV mounted on the wall. Over the course of the night, the TV blasted the 1990s TV sit-com Martin on loop—every episode on repeat—so loud it was impossible to sleep. It was not for the entertainment of me or the other two women there, who were also trying to sleep. I got up to stretch my legs and the staff yelled, “Ganeva! Sit down!” Never one to learn a lesson, I demanded to know why I couldn’t walk around. “I’m a reporter! You’ll be reading about this!” (once again, not a way to ingratiate yourself with people).  

“Don’t sass me!” the guard said. “If you don’t stop talking you’re going in the holding tank!” 

“What?!” “

“You’re still talking. Holding tank, now!” She led me to a small room with bright fluorescent lights and a stone bench just narrow enough that it was impossible to comfortably lay down, and she locked the door. The 5th repeat of a Martin episode managed to penetrate the locked door.  “Don’t pay Martin any mind, his parents were cousins!” screamed Martin’s nemesis Pam, from the TV.

Uncomfortable, but, what was really scary was that no one could tell me how I would make my bond, once it was established (“It takes between 8-12 hours” they told me) without an outside contact to bail me out. One guy said I could do it, but only if I had it in cash. No one else knew and anytime I got up to ask I was threatened with the holding tank. I kept frantically calling my parents but they didn’t pick up. Finally, in some kind of pseudo awake fever dream state, with Martin Lawrence and his girlfriend Gina, fighting about the dishes on the TV, I remembered my mom’s cell. She didn’t pick up. I tried again a few hours later, and staff yelled at me because, I guess there was some rule about not using the phone during staff change? I was confused. They took it as more rebellion and sent me back to the locked up holding cell.

When the booking process was complete, they led me and the other two women to our cells. As you read this next part, keep in mind that due to my wildly privileged status, the ordeal, from arrest to release, took roughly 14 hours. For others, jail stays can last days, weeks, months and in some cases, years, if the defendant can’t afford bail. This is a catastrophic problem: unlike prisons, jails aren’t designed for long stays. There are no programs for self-improvement. There are no books available (except the Bible, I was told.). These days, people serving time in prison have access to online messaging services and even tablets. That doesn’t happen in jail, where, by the way, virtually everyone is pre-trial and therefore legally innocent. 

The booking process is humiliating. You have to leave your clothes in a plastic bag and don an orange shirt, gross gray pants and hideous orange flip flops.

“What color is your underwear?” a guard asked.

“What? Why?” I was legit confused. I knew I could keep my underwear on, but had no idea why they needed to know the color.

“It’s protocol.” 

“Uhhh… my underwear is white?” I said, finally having figured out not to sass the guards.

It doesn’t help that everyone is extremely mean. The surreal thing is, when interacting with one another, the guards are funny and friendly, chatting about their kids and weekend plans. But in any interaction with an inmate they’re gruff, annoyed, just plain nasty. They greet one another like accountants at a water cooler, and then roll their eyes and yell at confused women in orange shirts. 

They did a body search several times (thank fucking god all the guards were women so I didn’t have to deal with the gropings that I’m sure regularly occur with male guards). 

They handed me bedding and led me to a cell. It was tiny. 6 by 10 at most. There were two bunks, the bottom one taken, and a small steel toilet. My cellmate was at her court hearing, I was told—I’d never meet her. They inexplicably dragged a blue plastic sled looking thing and plopped it on the floor. 

I made up the top bunk. After 9 hours of no sleep in hard chairs, I easily fell into a nap. As I stirred awake, I thought, “What a weird dream that wa–” then reality set in. I tried to figure out what time it was. I’d been hoping I’d get my bond soon, and then also hoping someone could help me figure out how to pay it, but no one responded when I kept asking the time, much less the complex logistical issue of how the Hell I could get bailed out without being able to contact anyone.

The prospect of sitting in this locked cell, with a small slit of a window looking out onto yellow grass and barbed wire, for even one night seemed intolerable to me. Please keep in mind that most people have to do this for days, months, or years. 

“It’ll be over soon,” I told myself. I thought about my grandfather, who spent 4 years in a brutal Bulgarian Gulag during Stalin times, and then at least 3 prisons after that. (I inherited an inability to learn lessons from him). ––––

Don’t be a baby,” I kept saying to myself. “Panicking never helps anything.” I panicked anyway, intermittently hyperventilating and tearing up.

No one knows I’m here, I thought. The door is locked in this tiny cell and I’m all alone. I caught someone’s attention and begged them to tell me the time and check on my bond. They said they would. They also barked at me to put my bedding on the plastic sled on the floor instead of the top bunk. 

“Huh? Why?” I asked. 

“It says in your paperwork that you’re in withdrawal.” During my medical check-up a nurse had decided that the bottle of Ativan I legally had on my person, which I literally take twice a month at most, and almost always for flights, meant I was in danger of withdrawal. 

“I take it like once or twice a month,” I tried to explain. “I am not, nor have I ever been, physically addicted to Ativan. Also, do I look like I’m in withdrawal?” 

“We have to follow the paper work. Put your bedding on the ground.” This arrangement, for what it’s worth, is not for the comfort of an inmate going through withdrawal, but so that if they throw up or shit themselves it’s easier for staff to clean.

Long story short, they finally checked on my bond. A guard opened the door and said, “You can go home.” What?! Apparently I was being released on my own recognizance. They cut off my bracelet, which had my mug shot on it. “Hey can I keep it, I look cute!” They were not amused. “I’m sure you’ll be back here soon and we’ll take another mug-shot..” Thanks public servant.

After a few more humiliating outtake procedures, I happily skipped out of the jail. I was elated, glorying in the humid, 95 degree heat, traipsing to a main road in my summer dress instead of a gross prison outfit. 

Addendum: I bought a charger, walked to a burger place, ate a sandwich, and opened my phone to find roughly one million calls and texts, including several from my mother telling me I was giving her a heart attack. It turns out that my parents had disconnected their landline, which is why my calls hadn’t gone through. 

When my mom got the cell message at 4am, she called my friend Justin in New York, who’s a reporter, who called my friend Liliana  (also one of those) who lives in Nashville, a few hours away from Memphis. She was out of town, but she called her husband, Radley (another one of those reporters) and he found me a great lawyer. Everyone had been rallying to help me, even as I’d been feeling totally alone and very sorry for myself. 

I met with the lawyer, Mike Working, that Radley got me in touch with, that evening.  He said he doesn’t take journalists’ money (finally! Some appreciation for the craft!) and the next morning, in court, he got the case dismissed and expunged in under 10 minutes. 

I sat in the pews, in the “respectable adult outfit” I was told to wear, as he worked his magic. To the side, penned in and watched over by a guard, were men and women—every single one of them Black—in orange and blue jail uniforms. They spoke with the judge, an angry woman who pursed her lips in distaste at every case brought before her (when she saw me whispering to a woman next to me she made me stand up and yelled at me about disrupting her court).  

“No ma’am,” a woman answered when the judge asked if she had a lawyer. After a few seconds of discussion with the judge they were led out, back to jail, for days, weeks, months.

Surely my extremely comfortable lifestyle has made me weak. And people with much harder lives are used to the lack of freedom and humiliation. But, you know, everyone in media made a huge deal about the protests and riots around the George Floyd murder. Let’s just say, given how the US criminal justice system treats poor people and people of color: you motherfuckers should be grateful there’s not a large-scale violent revolution.

 

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