To Protect and Serve…Our Organic Produce?

A friend and I popped into a Whole Foods recently for some produce and had a disturbing experience. My shopping partner tried a green grape, and made a face. “Sour,” she said, offering me one. “Hmm, this one’s sweet, try another,” I suggested. As she did, the uniformed DC Metropolitan Police Department officer posted at the front of the store walked in our direction, shouting at us: “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” My friend and I looked at each other, confused. “Us?” I asked. “Yeah, you!!” I was stunned, but shot back at her, “Um, is this really a police matter? It’s really not that serious.” We continued shopping while she complained loudly to a store employee.

The guy next to us, tasting grapes with his kids was laughing. “For real,” he said. “As much as they charge here for this fruit, too.”

The experience was embarrassing and disconcerting. Both my friend and I have felony records, and I’m still on probation. Either one of us could have ended up in a more serious predicament as a result of harmless everyday behavior. If not for my record, I would have likely confronted the officer more directly about her choices, but I knew doing so could put me in jeopardy.

I came away with a lot of questions. First, why is there a uniformed MPD officer posted at Whole Foods at all, in a city where?the Mayor and police chief say we’re short hundreds of officers ? With concerns about the MPD’s capacity to police violent crime in the District in the news daily, why is the department choosing to use its supposedly limited resources to monitor the produce aisles? And earlier this year,?an officer and high-ranking police union official was charged for working at a Whole Foods ?while collecting overtime from the department.

If we do need uniformed officers in grocery stores, should they be harassing people about sampling the produce? Does routine taste-testing justify this kind of police involvement, and does the Department believe it’s a good use of an officer’s enforcement discretion to intervene in this scenario?

What’s the public safety imperative here, in a city with real crime concerns? The last time I was at this same store, an MPD officer was in the bakery section forcing a young Black man with dreadlocks to empty his backpack. Usually, the officer just sits by the front door. Does any potential retail theft justify a full-time uniformed officer’s salary and benefits? This is a store where a dozen self-checkout lanes offer the ability to bag unpaid-for items if people choose to. It’s also next to Howard University, a mostly-Black school. Do stores in Georgetown or Palisades, or other white-majority areas keep uniformed officers at the door?

Finally, Whole Foods is now owned by Amazon; can’t billionaire owner Jeff Bezos afford to pay special police officers or private security guards to patrol his stores? How many MPD officers are posted in groceries across DC, and do taxpayers believe their presence is a worthwhile public expenditure that improves public safety?

The District has struggled recently to stem a rising tide of violent crime, particularly among youth, with serious disagreements about the causes and the remedies. The Mayor and City Council and?Washington Post columnists ?seem content to resurrect failed policies that fill our jails and solve nothing, and rest on retrograde definitions of public safety. Community?advocates for a freer, safer, and more racially just District ?understand that we cannot police, prosecute, and imprison our way out of these problems. As someone who spent six years in jail and prison, count me among the latter.

What I’ll tell you from experience is that DC’s jail is filled with young people, technical probation violators, people suffering addiction and mental health crises, and misdemeanants. Many of those arrested are ultimately let go with time served, a few days, weeks, or months – because they were arrested for antisocial behavior or petty crimes that incarceration won’t solve and that aren’t worth the time and expense it would take to prosecute.

The notion that handcuffs and a cell will make people better, reduce crime, or solve our public safety problems is a convenient and costly fiction, one that communities of color in this city pay the price for daily. In a city that’s less than half Black now, our courtrooms and jail are still filled 90 percent full of young Black men and women. Investments in communities that work to divert people from jail have to be matched by a commitment from city leaders to stand up for what works instead of what’s politically expedient.

In this kind of environment, does it make any sense at all for DC’s supposedly overstretched police force to be patrolling the grocery aisles, counting sour grapes?

Daniel Rosen, 53, is a formerly incarcerated writer and advocate who has lived in the District for almost 30 years. His writing can be found at Three Hots One Cot: Dispatches from a Prison Cell and Beyond .