Jesse Brown’s Confession: “I Had Violated My Own Ethics By Calling the Police.”
The Indianapolis Councilman’s Account of His Rage-Filled, Racially-Charged Incident.
After almost two weeks of silence, 13th District, Indianapolis Councilman Jesse Brown s has released two versions of the March 27th incident on Google Docs titled “Bikes, Cops, Fear”.
Here is the long version in full:
Wednesday night, while riding my bike, I was struck from behind by a driver, knocking me off my bike and splaying me across the pavement.
With that emotional hook written, I’ll give you a spoiler alert: everyone involved in this story ends up fine. But I learned powerful lessons here that I wanted to share.
Every time I get on my bike, I’m flooded with emotions. I’ve never ridden anything a tenth as fun as my Radsport 6 e-bike. Thanks to the pedal assist, I can go further and faster than my unathletic 38-year-old body would normally carry me. It’s an absolute joy to ride it. I get to say hello to people I pass; I get to hear, smell, see my neighborhood and feel the wind on my face. I collect more Vitamin D from sunlight than would be possible in a car. I feel connected with my beloved city.
But I also feel afraid. I always wear a helmet, and as I strap it on I think about how many cyclists die on the streets of Indianapolis each year - six last year alone. And I think about how many total pedestrians and cyclists are injured by drivers - at least 50 in January and 52 in February this year. There is no safe way to travel in our city, so I don’t let this deter me - but every single time I ride, I think about it.
When I am forced out of a bike lane by city employees, contractors, delivery drivers, or others who use it as parking, I say a tiny prayer that I’m not killed for someone else’s convenience.And when I am forced to share a lane with cars because my city values a “balanced budget” over the safety of its residents, I say a slightly bigger prayer as I never feel more afraid for my life than then.
Each and every time I take a trip more than a few blocks on my bike, I send a little message to my wife, just letting her know where I am headed. Both of us always imagine the need for her to try to rally emergency help or otherwise find me after a potential collision or injury.
Wednesday evening, we were both glad that I had done so.I had almost made it home. I was stopped at a red light, waiting to turn left once the signal allowed it. The light turned green, and I waited for oncoming traffic to clear so I could make my turn.
As I heard the driver of the car behind me step on their accelerator pedal, I immediately felt a wave of fear and time seemed to slow down.
My first thought was that the driver was annoyed by me and was making a close, unsafe lane change into the right lane to avoid needing to wait for me to turn. That’s happened to me before - sometimes accompanied by a rude gesture, profanity, or a shouted wish that I would kill myself.
Then I thought that the driver was attempting to intimidate me in retribution for causing them a few seconds’ delay. Perhaps they were revving their engine while still in park to make me fear for my life - this, too, has happened to me with a fairly regular frequency.It wasn’t until the car behind me slammed into the back of my bike that I realized I was being hit by a car. All the joy of sensory experience that a bike allows for turned to terror. My vision was a blur as my head whipped backwards, then forwards due to the unexpected impact. I smelled car exhaust and motor oil. I felt the impact on my back and my side. I heard the car continuing to accelerate even after the point of impact.
I was thrown off my bike, thankfully landing on my butt. My left arm was wrenched and my elbow hurts, since it was fully extended to signal the turn. My bike has some new battle scars and I’ll need to replace at least one part destroyed when it hit the pavement - but it’s operable. All things considered, this was likely among the most minor and least life-impacting ways to be struck by a car while on a bike.
It was also easily one of the most terrifying moments I’ve experienced in the last decade. No car driving west so much as stopped, and had I been thrown a few feet over, I’d have been in the path of oncoming traffic and could have been killed even with such a light impact and at such low speeds.
As I managed to pick myself up, I turned around to see that the driver who hit me had not exited his car, nor put it in park, nor put on flashers to help protect the person he struck who was on the ground in the road in front of him. I wish I could say I responded with grace and professionalism, but I did not.
From the driver’s perspective, a tall white man in a red hat stood up and was screaming at him, obviously not thinking clearly or rationally. Each of us was terrified that the other might be armed and might be wishing the other physical harm. He was obviously extremely young and inexperienced. He was terrified, and remained in the car with his hands on the steering wheel.
Still, he managed to immediately and repeatedly apologize. He asked me to come closer so we could talk, despite the fear in his eyes. He asked if he could send me a payment on his phone. Offended and still enraged, I insisted that we had to call the police for the accident report. But from his perspective, this angry white man was screaming at him and talking about summoning the police, as white people have done for decades, and as often results in both criminal records and brutality.
He drove away. I screamed after him that he was committing a hit-and-run. I wrote down his license plate number. I felt victimized, shocked, and was still in the throes of trauma - as I’m sure he was.I called 911, not even sure what I wanted out of the situation. More than anything, I wanted a sense of closure and I wanted to stop feeling afraid. The officer who responded was polite and respectful, but couldn’t offer me that.
At home later, I had trouble sleeping. I kept thinking about the Scenario-Based Training, put on by the police department, which I had attended last week.That training was incredibly interesting to me. It involved being equipped with a sim gun (think of a paintball gun that is the size and weight of an actual 9mm pistol) and a holster and encountering a variety of situations and responding to them however we’d like. Since I’m a pacifist, I had decided to do my best not to draw my gun during the training. That was indeed the best action several times in these scenarios. It was rare that there was any need for, or indeed any benefit from, using violence. Then came a scenario where as I tried to use my calming, de-escalating voice, I was “shot”.
I hadn’t even thought the actor had had a gun, and they had been moving with obvious intentional slowness to drive the point home. Immediately following that scenario, I went on a “domestic violence call” and arrived on the scene to find a large man with his back to me, physically beating a much smaller woman. Determined to learn my lesson, I drew my “gun” and demanded the man stop. He totally ignored my commands, and for a moment I stood there thinking “surely I’m not supposed to just shoot this man in the back right now?” It turns out the best answer was not to have a gun out at all, but just to jump into harm’s way to hold the man’s arms down to protect the woman.
I’ve had socialist comrades roll their eyes and call such training “copaganda” - attempts to show that the police do no wrong and are always the good guys, no matter what a given scenario might look like in the media.
Perhaps it would function as “copaganda” to some, but I didn’t take that from it at all.
Instead it confirmed my existing thoughts about the police.
I ran for office with this description of police and public safety:
“Indianapolis currently uses armed police officers to shoulder the burdens caused by ignoring root issues of poverty, inequality, mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, and more. As Fox News investigated, Indianapolis taxpayers paid $16 million to settle cases of police misconduct over the five years ending in 2020. Clearly, the solution is not to throw more police officers into this dangerous and unfair expectation; the solution is to fix the underlying problems that cause crime. I am an advocate of clinician-led emergency response teams, and see Indianapolis’s current pilot program as a small step in the right direction. We should provide emergency responses to all of our residents’ needs, including those related to mental health, with respondents trained to help with specific needs, rather than armed law enforcement. “When talking with my constituents, I often explained this stance using the analogy of my experience as a high school teacher. When I was a teacher, I needed to make sure my students’ physical and emotional needs were met before they’d have any chance of sitting still for hours on end, much less actually learning anything. One student routinely showed up late, and I lectured him until I found out that the electricity was shut off at his house and he had a hard time waking up without an alarm. Instead of a lecture, he needed electricity. But I didn’t have the tools to provide everything my students needed, and I was paid based on the students passing standardized tests, not based on them having secure home lives.
In the same way, I believe we are asking our police officers to respond to a thousand types of personal crises that our neighbors and we might experience, with the tools and training to resolve none of the root issues that led to these emergencies. At best, our current criminal justice system is like sending someone out with a box of band-aids every single day but never stitching up a wound.
At worst, it is giving stressed-out, scared-for-their-lives people guns and sending them rushing into potentially dangerous situations every single day, and then blaming them as individuals when that inevitably occasionally leads to horrific outcomes.And it’s by far the biggest budget item in our city every single year.
My old teenage friends were victimized by the Indianapolis police. In my very first car I had as a teenager, my left-wing bumper stickers and my dreadlocks led to frequent interactions with police officers that treated me as an enemy. Cops told me to my face that they hated my guts and thought I was a traitor to my country, due to my opposition to the war in Iraq. To this day, I remember a state trooper in Iowa who followed eighteen-year-old me on the interstate for fifteen minutes as I drove in the right lane, five miles under the speed limit with my hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, until he finally pulled up beside me in the left lane, held up his empty hand like a gun, gestured like he was shooting me a few times, then sped off down the highway. There are definitely bad cops out there - I’ve run across them myself.
I have marched in the streets over and over again for the victims of police violence. I clearly remember coming out for the Jena Six, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Aaron Bailey, Dreasjon Reed, McHale Rose, and George Floyd. And I’m sick to my stomach to admit that there are probably many more marches, for more names than I currently can recall. Many more times, I cried to myself at home. I read books. I organized actions. I donated money. I attended lectures. I absolutely do not tolerate police killings, and each and every one is a preventable tragedy that fills me with rage and sorrow.
But very often, I can believe what the officers involved in some of those incidents have said. They feared for their lives. They weren’t sure how many bullets they fired. They did the best they could with the information they had in front of them, and they were in a situation where they didn’t feel they could take their time to come up with the right solution - they felt they had to trust their instincts.
I had had a minor scrape on my bike more than 24 hours ago, and I was legitimately still flooded with adrenaline - the fear-induced rage lasted hours and hours after a scared kid apologized to me, drove away from me silently, and offered me zero threat.
I had violated my own ethics by calling the police and screamed profanity at a scared child. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more ashamed of myself, but it took many hours before I was even aware of that shame. The fear was that powerful.
It makes me ill to think of what it must be like to have similar surprise shocks to the system nearly every day, six days in a row. Plus, there’s the risk of violence. For civilians, studies show that the victims of violent crime are shot more often when they have a gun on them than when they don’t. For shootings where the victim had a chance to defend themselves, it’s even more likely that the victim having a gun results in the victim being shot.
I have yet to see researchers gather enough data to form a very certain theory about why this is, but I have a hypothesis: When a person is actively frightened of life-ending consequences, they think less rationally and do what they feel they need to do to protect themselves.Based on the interaction itself, I had no reason at all to think that the kid who hit me intended to do so. It sounded like the collision had messed up his car, he was very quick to apologize, and he clearly felt scared based on his behavior. None of that speaks to attempted vehicular homicide or the behavior of a sadist. And yet he was willing to commit a much more serious crime in order to run away, based on hearing the word “police.” We all respond to trauma and fear in ways that are not ideal.
My fear that the driver may have been intentionally trying to run me down was based on past experiences. I’ve experienced aggressive driver behavior too often to count, including behavior that put my life at risk in order to teach me that I wasn’t welcome on the roads.
But I didn’t experience that behavior coming from the driver who struck me. I allowed my fear and my past experiences to push me to do something that could be extremely harmful to a person who didn’t deserve that from me - and in the moment, I didn’t even care.Just like police officers who open fire on unarmed people, I was triggered by the fear and past trauma to make a snap decision that could mess up somebody’s whole life. I angrily threatened a young Black man with the police. And then I doubled down on that threat by filing a criminal report, even though at the time I didn’t think it would result in any harm to any individual.
The next morning, I got a surprise message from a detective stating that in fact, upon review, a small transposition error in the license plate had led to a misunderstanding. The police had indeed been able to find the car in question, and went to the owner’s address to speak to her. Her teenage son had been driving, and he was afraid for his life based on perceptions of how interactions with the police can go for young Black men. She was afraid for him for those same reasons.
In this specific situation, the only people who were using their heads and not filled with fear and adrenaline as a result of the incident were the responding officer, district commander, investigating detective and chief of police.
I dropped the criminal case and asked for written confirmation that nothing bad will happen to the driver or his mother.
And I’ll live with my very deep shame and use it to grow as a person. I shouldn’t have immediately started talking about the police to the young man who was apologizing to me. I shouldn’t have screamed at him as he drove away. I shouldn’t have had a criminal report filed. And I damn sure shouldn’t have posted on social media.
At every step in the interaction, I could have de-escalated and offered compassion. Instead, I let the fear take the wheel even when people I love tried to get me to calm down first.
I’m a police and prison abolitionist who has been an activist for my entire life, and I embarrassed myself and acted irrationally in the context of fear and adrenaline. I certainly hope that others are capable of better and more thought than I demonstrated in this scenario, but at the end of the day, I’m leaving this event more committed than ever to my politics.
To me, the next steps are clear. We need to loudly, publicly, and transparently commit to Vision Zero. Through this framework, we must design and build an environment that does not require throwing human beings into situations likely to provoke such powerful fear responses.
We need to reimagine public safety and find opportunities to stem the flow of system failures upstream, rather than ask police officers to leap from crisis response to crisis response with no end in sight.
We need to reimagine our world and find every opportunity to offer empathy and compassion, not threats and the use of violence.
We need a politics of love and solidarity
After reading his overwrought confession, I am more convinced that Councilman Brown has a temperament that is unsuited to public office and needs to resign.
I have sent an email to Councilman Brown requesting he give the IMPD permission to release all information, written, audio, video pertaining to this case.
Stay tuned for more developments.
UPDATE: Councilman Jesse Brown has refused to ask IMPD to release information, audio, video etc. because:
I don't think any of these records are going to offer much insight to you or others, and don't think that it's worth the time and resources from taxpayers to ask them for these records.
And:
I remain deeply embarrassed by the actions I outlined in my written piece, but I'm satisfied with the conclusion of the situation and I'm happy to be focused on the future.
This is the second incident I know of where Jesse Brown has lost his temper. It fits a pattern. I predicted this would happen last December and I predict he will do it again.
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"Prison abolitionist." Right. No jails. No crime and punishment. Just allow criminals, thugs, murderers and rapists do whatever they want.
I am all in favor of prison reform, our current system of prisoner incarcerations is barbaric.
But abolishing prisons?
I hope no one in their right mind votes for this guy.