Being treated as a suspect as you go about your life, minding your own business, even just outside your own home: that really is a feeling a lot of us haven't experienced. To have to be concerned that the cops who arrive to follow up on such a call might not be inclined to assume innocence, that is an awful thing to have to deal with. First the caller has their suspicions (who they are and why they did this you don't get to know), then dispatch passes just the most minimal info to the officer. Then the cops come and if they're not having a good day or just came from another call where they got all amped up with adrenaline and they're telling themselves they're not taking any more back talk from anyone today, they're not gonna be bullshitted again after that last call, then they're really "gonna need to see some ID" or run your name when you tell them you're just going about your business. They can't take your word for it. Remember when this happened to Henry Louis Gates in front of his own home? If you do the reasonable thing, which is get angry with them interrupting you and hassling you and making you feel like your freedom to go about your business is at their mercy right then, and your life is really in their hands and not your own anymore, well then you're really in trouble. And if you zip your lips and appear calm and bottle it up to get through the ordeal, then after that you really do want to go to a demonstration to express how this treatment makes you feel and how it affects your life, you have to wonder if the result will be an arrest that goes on your record, which really does give police all the further justification they need to see you as trouble when they run your name in the future. You wanted to exercise your right of free speech but your "threat score" just went up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
But I came here to say this: on this holiday every year I experience a familiar feeling when I go to check the news headlines at Democracy Now. Oh yeah, it's MLK day, they only air his speeches on this day. Most years I think yadda yadda I know, I've heard it all before, we don't need to be continually prescribed and assigned MLK, that just makes him seem familiar and we skip over his content because he's a cliché, ok no headlines today, moving on...but sometimes I read the transcripts of the speeches. The way that guy wrote was really something. You can see that he really considered his words before committing to any formulation, thinking over and over his sentences before finding the most meaningful and effective way to convey what he was trying to communicate. It's not just about choosing words to fit a cadence, which we tend to get absorbed in when we hear his speeches. He was very careful to make himself understood and understandable, and he succeeded at getting the substance of what he was saying understood by a good number of us, even if there too many Americans in our time who are familiar with his name and face who have still never really tried to understand his words.
What a writer. Really, how ridiculous is it that I'm trying to describe his writing? Read this recently found speech he delivered in London in December 1964, that's what I'm talking about: