Was KC-area woman arrested after parking while Black? ‘We are used to it happening to us’
A popular social media meme among my fellow conservatives right now goes something like, “Has anyone mentioned that police will leave you alone if you don’t do illegal stuff?”
Sound counsel, to be sure, but not always true. Certainly not for people of color I’ve come to know. That haunts the hell out of me, as I’d hope it does all my fair-skinned friends, and surely shoots holes all through that simplistic saying.
Amid the George Floyd protests in Kansas City, one friend who is Black told me her two young professional sons have been stopped by police repeatedly for nothing — the youngest having seen the barrel of an officer’s gun twice.
But most poignantly for me, another hard-working friend in the cleaning business, was sprucing up a client’s duplex last year in Parkville when someone called 911 to complain about her parking acumen.
Von Voner, who is Black, was carted off to jail on a 20-year-old misdemeanor failure-to-appear that took some serious digging to find, after an initial criminal check turned up nothing on her. It was a warrant that she and virtually no one else in the world seemed to know about in those many years since. Yeah, it was that important.
Serendipitously, Voner is known, loved and respected in powerful circles, especially at the Midwest Innocence Project, which fights to free the wrongfully incarcerated. Her supporters flooded the police station with concern and testimonials.
“I’ve never had people rally for me like that,” she says. “It felt really good, ‘cause the phones were ringing off the hook.”
Police had to be wonderstruck. Who in the world had they just put in handcuffs? By the time her friend, lawyer and Midwest Innocence Project advocate Lindsay Runnels appeared on the scene, Runnels encountered officers who had actually delighted in getting to know the woman they’d put behind bars.
Did being Black help lead to this arrest?
In fact, one officer took the trouble to go back to a shop owner on the same street — another client of Voner’s — to apologize for the spectacle and to actually vouch for her.
Just as luckily, court was in session a few hours after the arrest — otherwise she might have languished a night or two in custody. She never saw a judge, though, because the warrant was so fossilized it crumbled in the hands of the prosecutor, who quickly washed those hands of it.
Dime-a-dozen, decades-old misdemeanor warrants like that? “They’re not generally things people get arrested for,” Runnels says. “I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t have been arrested for that. And you’re going to cuff somebody for that?”
And why not arrest Runnels for such a thing? “In my view, Von didn’t get any of the benefit of the doubt that a lot of folks like me — white people — enjoy.”
Voner and her other supporters agree, and so do I. Racial profiling, perhaps only playing in the background, had to play a part in such a penny-ante lock-up.
“We see being Black while bird watching,” Runnels notes. “Being Black while parking, in Von’s instance. People are calling the police on people for doing everyday normal things, when that is not the experience of a lot of white folks. It happens every day to people like Von.”
As Runnels puts it, one needs to understand that “your world isn’t ‘the’ world.”
“I know (race) had something to do with it,” says the 55-year-old Voner. “We are used to it happening to us. And we know. We know that we’re being treated differently and unfairly, ‘cause we feel it. And that’s something that I can’t explain to you, because you’ve never had to deal with that. But we know. We know how they approach. We know their body language, we know their mannerism. We know it when it comes.”
She no longer fit the stereotype
It probably didn’t help that Voner’s troubled past with addiction had meant stints in prison, allowing for ready-made material with which officers could put together a stereotypical stereograph of her that no longer depicts reality. In truth, she’s a role model for and sought-after speaker to so many, including women inmates about to follow in her footsteps of societal re-entry, if they can only fill those big shoes of hers. That mug shot officers saw was of a woman who no longer exists — and who now finds herself surprisingly relieved at the discomfort she felt in a jail cell she used to feel so familiar.
“They were looking at something,” she says, “that substantiated how they were feeling toward me. ‘She’s a drug addict, she ain’t got no business over here, she’s over here doing something. We’re going to take her to jail, we’re going to find out what’s going on.’
“So, with all this support coming into that station, that just did not fit what they’d seen in that mug shot and that history.”
With any luck, it was a paradigm shift for those officers. One I wish we could share with the masses, so that someday people of color can join the rest of us in believing police will leave you alone if you just don’t do illegal stuff.
