BLUE LIGHTS ILLUMINATED La Becky Roe’s rearview mirror. The two NYPD police officers who pulled her over in her Brooklyn neighborhood were white. Roe is Black. She asked them why they stopped her, and they ignored her. When she asked again, they demanded her license, registration, and insurance card but offered no explanation for the stop.
Only later, after they told Roe she was free to go, did she tell them she was an NYPD officer, too.
“Why didn’t you just say you were a cop in the beginning?” one officer asked.
“Why do I have to say I’m a cop,” she shot back, “to get treated with respect?”
“This could’ve been my mother; this could’ve been my dad,” Roe explains two decades later. “They want respect, too. I wanted to know what the response would be if I’m just Joe Citizen.”
Roe, who moved to Charlotte in 2002, is among the newest members of the city’s Citizens Review Board, the 11-member civilian body that reviews cases in which citizens have appealed a police ruling after an official complaint of police misconduct. Roe spent 12 years as an NYPD cop, and she wishes more people recognized officers as fellow humans. But as a Black woman and the mother of an autistic son, she wants more officers to see beyond race and abilities to recognize the humanity of the people they interact with.
This story is from the November 2020 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
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This story is from the November 2020 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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