Girls in Trouble with the Law

Chapter 1: New Troubles for Girls

9 1 New Troubles for Girls Two police cars arrived at the corner in a poorly lit neighborhood almost simultaneously.1 Cutting the sirens but leaving on flashing blue and red lights, both officers pointed their bright headlights at the group of girls embroiled in a fight. It was 2:15 a.m. on a Friday night in 1999. Officer Robinson, the young African American woman I was riding with, jumped out of the car and sprinted toward the melee. Several young women had already started scattering in all directions . Springing out of the other police car—an unmarked Chevy—two young men, one white and one Latino, immediately began separating the two remaining girls. “OK! OK! Knock it off! OK!” shouted the police officers as they disentangled the young women locked in struggle. Empty bottles of the cheap liquor Mad Dog 20/20 were in the gutter nearby. As Officer Robinson explained afterward, the first thing that police do when they come upon such a scene is to separate and handcuff everyone involved so they can begin to sort out what was going on. While checking the combatants for weapons and drugs, an officer found a box cutter in the pocket of one of the girls, Claudia Sereno. Officer Robinson, musing later that night, supposed that the officers had caught this fight right at the beginning, before Claudia had taken out the blade and used it. Claudia continued struggling. “I’M A KICK YOUR ASS! TE CORTO! TE CORTO [I will cut you]!” she was yelling while kicking her legs at the arresting officer’s partner. One of the officers was holding her arms from behind, and she was kicking at the other officer coming toward her from the front. Claudia was a tough, small, round-faced, seventeen-year-old Latina, known to the juvenile law enforcement officers as a “fighter.” Her front tooth was chipped from fighting with somebody in her neighborhood: “I 10 Girls in Trouble with the Law love to fight! I cracked my tooth in a fight when a guy hit me with a milk crate!” she told me later. Claudia had long dark brown hair, parted in the middle and usually tied in a ponytail in the back, but her hair was flying all over the place as she fought being handcuffed and deposited in the backseat of the police car. She continued yelling and kicking the doors from inside the back of the car. “Te mato, cabrón! Verás lo que te hago! I’ma kill all y’alls!” Claudia was spitting and jerking around in a terrible fury, crying and screaming all at once. “Claudia, my name is Officer Rodriguez. Tienes que calmarte. I need you to calm down and tell me what happened,” one of the officers said to her. Officer Robinson was speaking with the other girl, Dominique Alexander. “She jus’ came at me! We was walking over to Maria Elena’s place. We weren’t doin’ nothin’! We were jus’ kickin’ it man, you know. Man, these girls came outta nowhere and that bitch jus’ jumped on me!” Officer Robinson put her in the backseat of our car. Dominique begged the police officer, “Please don’t wake up my grandmother. She’ll kill me! Go ahead and take me in, but, man, please don’t call my grandmother !” The police officers conferred for about twenty minutes, talking to the young women, checking their stories, and looking for their names on “Known Gang Members” lists. “It’s the one thing I hate the most, is when these kids lie to me,” one of the officers told me. “I don’t care what they are doing out here, just don’t lie to me about it, like I’m stupid .” I learned later that the officers like to take their time once everybody is cuffed. They figure that if they let the girls’ adrenaline dissipate as they simmer in the backseats of the cruisers, the young women may begin to realize the serious trouble they are in. According to these officers , strategies for working with juveniles included letting them settle down, making sure they are not carrying weapons, assessing that they are not “too high” or overdosed, and getting them to focus on the dangers of being on the streets late at night. As we drove Dominique home, Officer Robinson left the lights flashing and kept Dominique in handcuffs. We pulled into the run-down public housing apartment complex and...