This is even more embarassing than last time.

Question I answered correctly during trivia yesterday, to my great shame:

* name any two of the Camden children from the show “7th Heaven.”

Question I had no idea how to answer so I sat, mute, as the competitors around me frantically tried to be the first to buzz in:

* what i the period of the sine function?

My trig teacher would be so ashamed of me. Assuming sine was from trig. Maybe it was calculus. I might as well say that the entire math department would be ashamed of me, just to be safe.

As part of a class I’m taking on policing strategies, I went on a ride-along with the gang and tactical teams of a Chicago police district on Friday night. This is the marquee event of this class, and I was excited to ride in the back on an unmarked car, seeing what goes on in that part of the city on a Friday night. I put on a loose sweatshirt (so a bulletproof vest could fit underneath,) jeans (to fit in with the casual dress of the tactical units,) sneakers (in case of running,) and mascara (please don’t ask me why I felt compelled to put on makeup for the trip with the policemen, because I have no explanation for this embarassing instinct.)

When I got to the police station, they seemed entirely surprised to see me, and there were some fun, tense minutes during which the tac and gang units engaged in a kind of police officer waltz, trying to force someone else to take the stupid law student with them so they could actually just do their jobs like normal. It’s nice to be loved. Finally, a tac unit lost the dance, and I climbed into the backseat of their beat up Ford to hit the streets.

Apparently, a lot of being a tactical officer involves driving around in circles in a very very small portion of your very very large district, the very very small portion of interest being, coincidentally, the area where the public housing units are located. I get it, crime happens most there, particularly the kind of violent crime that tac units are designed to address, but it was still sort of amazing how small a radius we covered given the enormity of the district.

The other thing that being a tactical officer apparently entails is the unprovoked stopping, frisking, and questioning of young minority men. During my three hours of ridealong, I watched the officers search fourteen young men of color, all of whom were politely told they could go on their way. None of them had anything illegal in their possession. None of them was DOING anything illegal that mandated a stop and search. But what was worst, to me, was that not a one of them looked even a little bit surprised or upset at being stopped and searched. Several of them even laughed and joked and seemed to enjoy kind of an easy rapport with the cops who were patting down their groins and reaching into the armpits of their coats to check for illegal substances or weapons.

Maybe the officers were doing their best to show the law student ridealong some action on an otherwise slow Friday night. Maybe these kids were known gang members and part of keeping gang violence under control is to let them know you’re watching. Maybe I should be impressed that the cops manage to create rapport with the very kids whose civil rights they are violating in conducting these warrantless searches. Who knows. All I know is that last year, when my car got searched by some East St. Louis cops who claimed “a drug dog smelled something” so they had to paw through my suitcases and check under the cusions of my car’s seats, I felt violated for DAYS. All I could talk about with my friends Mason and Carolina, who had been with me on our epic road trip to pre-hurricane New Orleans and who were in the car with me, was my sneaking suspicion that there had been no drug sniffing dog and we had just been the target of a random, warrantless search. It happened almost a year ago and we still sometimes bring it up at parties as an example of how crazy the police can act.

I cannot fathom what it would be like to have the police stop and search me as part of my normal, day-to-day routine. That three hour ridealong gave me more of an insight into the way we police our cities than I think anyone intended.

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading examples of transcripts where detectives are interviewing juveniles, to see some of the techniques, and to compare what’s been happening in the case I’m working on with other similar cases.

There are some interesting things I have learned from reading these examples. For example, certain detectives like to teach religion lessons while interrogating suspects: “You know what karma is? You know, what you put out into the world comes back to someone in your life. So if you do something bad, and you don’t make amends, something bad is going to happen to your grandma, or your little brother.” Some detectives prefer a less religions approach, staying with the classic: “the truth will set you free.” My personal favorite, however, is the “television is the only common denominator” approach: “You watch CSI, right? You know then about transference. Transference is whenever you go somewhere, you leave something behind- a footprint, an eyelash, some skin- and we can tell. So it doesn’t really matter if you tell the truth. We’ll still know.”

Now, technically, it IS legal to tell a suspect a lie during an interrogation in an effort to get them to divulge information. But come on, people- do you really think that they’re going to find your EYELASH in the FOREST where the shooting happened? A week later? Come ON. You would be amazed at how many people just spill all their shit after these little speeches.

I wonder what a cop could tell me that would compel me to tell the truth. I mean, I have kind of a problem with lying, (remember the principal/spelling test episode?) so I’d probably just walk into the room, burst into tears, and tell the whole thing. But if, for some reason, I was playing things close to the vest, a cop could probably get me to spill all with a quick “Ralph Feinnes is waiting for you to confess.”* Or a glass and a half of wine.

* But only if he correctly pronounced it “raif”, not rallllph.

Recently typed in my notes:

· Ginburg had a trategy to bring cases that were as unthreatening as possible- men as plaintiff and really minor issues- to create a wedge in the law- rather than addresing isues like the core of the ocial ecurity laws, or domestic violence, or omething imilarly big:

Dammit, I’m going to have to call Dell again, aren’t I?

Here are some things I learned on My Winter Vacation to Oklahoma:

- Oklahoma is in The South. I had thought that maybe it was in the midwest, or even on the edge of just plain west. Then I tasted my green beans at dinner. Ham in green beans = The South.

- Tulsa is McMansion central. I’m sure there must be a downtown Tulsa somewhere, but damned if I saw one. All I saw were miles and miles of suburban sprawl, with 70′s ranch houses near the “city center” (which I knew was the city center because the main street is labelled “First Street,”) and then bigger, newer, faux-brick caverns out towards the edges of town (near 71st street.) This answers what had been a puzzle to me: my totally-not-city-slicker relatives have addresses in Tulsa, as opposed to a suburb thereof. Now I realize that this is totally consistent with their non-city-slickerness, as Tulsa is just one big suburb.

- Oklahoma, while warmer than Chicago, is not actually warm. I did that stupid thing where I looked at weather.com, saw that it was warmer than Chicago, and decided not to bring a single warm item of clothing because “it’s mild there.” Yes, technically 46 degrees is warmer than 33 degrees, but either way you’re going to want a jacket. Tulsa ladies know this, so for February weddings every single one of them arrives wearing floor length fur coats. I hadn’t seen a fur coat in a while, (except on Adrianna furs commercials,) but apparantly 1988 is still alive and kicking in Tulsa. Let’s not even talk about the woman wearing the bright teal strapless dress with the shoes died to match. Suffice it to say she is from Dallas.

- People in Tulsa are very tan. Unnaturally tan. Sort of a scary, orange, goodness it’s impossible to look at anything besides your tan kind of tan. This applies especially to the bride and groom at this wedding, who looked as though they had taken a Carribbean honeymoon immediately before the ceremony. I blame this tanorexia on the proliferation of tanning salons on every Tulsa corner, in every Tulsa strip mall. (Strip mall, you say? In a city? See “Tulsa is a suburb,” above.) I have never felt so pale.

And that is what I learned from The Tulsa Wedding. Also, some other stuff about my family being officially, once and for all, batshit crazy. But that’s normal for a wedding. The tanning? NOT NORMAL.

John and I are off today to a family wedding in Tulsa. This has been the perfect occasion for me to make all kinds of jokes about cattle, and musicals, and debutante balls, which, let me tell you, are hillarious. I’m trying to get them all out of my system before we actually arrive in Tulsa, because I have this sneaking suspicion that the “silly southerner” jokes aren’t going to go over so well with the family that actually lives there. You know, full time.

Here’s something you might not have known:

Before a person who is a suspect in a criminal investigation can give a statement to the police, the police have to give read that person their Miranda rights.

Okay, you might have already known that. What you might not have known, however, is that it is very very common for the police to “read someone their Miranda rights” in the form of a sheet of paper that says “these are your rights sign here to waive them and we can keep talking to you.”

As in:

Police officer: Now, this is just a technicality, but I need you to sign this piece of paper before we can keep talking.
Suspect: [signs paper]

Poof!

Just like that, Miranda is “waived” and the person’s statements can and will be used against them in a court of law, and there is no attorney there to, you know, tell them to shut the f up and stop feeding the police information because the police are trying to put your ass in jail.

What? You say you knew that too? Well, here’s the kicker:

Courts have upheld the ability to waive Miranda in kids as young as nine. Now I don’t know about you, but when I was nine, I:

– Broke my arm falling off a swingset

- Was really really fond of a stuffed pig I named “Mr. Piggums”

- Believed that the principal of my elementary school would somehow be able to tell if I cheated on my spelling test. She would just know.

- Was totally scandalized when Mallory’s friend on Family Ties got pregnant and wouldn’t tell her mother.

I’m pretty sure that when I was nine, I did not have the presence of mind, poise, or understanding of the legal system to really get what “waiving Miranda” was all about. I’m pretty sure that if a police officer told me that something was “just a technicality,” and that I “needed” to sign something, I would sign it no matter what. And I was a pretty astute nine-year-old.

You might guess that this is something that has come up in the clinic where I work, and you would be right. Our client, who is 14, was told that he “needed to sign and it was just a technicality,” before he told the police about how his friend had gotten into a fight with some gangbangers.

That statement is the only thing the police have to connect our client to this incident. And now our client is charged with first degree murder.