On Friday night, while returning from an evening with friends, I was the victim of what I believe to be an attempted carjacking. Just a few blocks from my home in Emeryville, I was driving through a residential neighborhood in Oakland. Shortly after making a left turn, I heard a loud crack on the frame of my car, loud enough to be heard above the trance music blaring from my stereo. I silenced the music and quickly looked around, but saw nothing, and continued without stopping. Perhaps a rock was kicked up by my tire, I thought. I slowed to a stop before a red light at the next intersection. A moment later I was startled by a loud crack followed by a crumbling sound outside my door. My first glance was to my rear view mirror, revealing three men in black hoodies sprinting towards my car. I threw open the throttle and barreled through the red light and empty intersection. Less than a minute later I was home - though not by my usual route - and on the phone with police.
I parked my car, inspected it for damage (I found none), and walked to the nearest street corner to meet the police. A marked cruiser with two officers inside arrived seconds later. I briefed them on what happened, and was asked only one question: “Could you identify them if you saw them again?”
It was pitch dark, half-past midnight, and my glance at the attackers lasted only a fraction of a second. Three men, black or blue jeans, black hoodies.
“No,” I replied, in an instinctively honest demeanor, “I can’t even tell you their ethnicity”. While replaying the event in my head, I thought I saw black faces beyond the hoodies, but I could not have been reasonably sure in such poor lighting. The cops told me to go home, that they would contact me if needed, and then hurried towards the intersection with lights off and engine roaring.
The next day, I returned to the scene to investigate. There at the intersection where I had stopped the night before was a large block of cement, whose broken remnants amounted to roughly ten pounds. The block had crumbled under its own weight as it landed a mere two or three feet from my door. The cement block would have blown through my window or windshield effortlessly, and could have knocked me unconscious or worse. The three men running towards my car demonstrated the least of their intent was to hurt me.
The encounter feels to me like a carjacking. I drove through an empty street, late at night, in the model of car most frequently stolen in this country. Alternately, it could have been racial - the part of Oakland I drove through is almost entirely black, and I have gotten the sense of racial tension before. I’m a blond caucasian guy driving a Honda - an appealing target if you’re pissed off at white people.
I am relieved that I kept cool, quickly assessed the situation, and decisively got out of danger. My doors were locked, I watched for traffic ahead of me, and had the police on the phone immediately. There was, for a fleeting moment, a temptation to abandon my flee, flip my car around, and turn the assailants into targets; clearly, an unwise (and unfulfilled) impulse. However, this is not my moral dilemma: I’d have gladly run the assholes over had it been safe and legally justifiable.
The officers found the attackers. They were young black men, wearing blue or black jeans and black hoodies. They were a block away from the reported intersection. Clearly, these were the guys, and there isn’t a sad story in the world that would prevent me from pursuing severe criminal and civil recourse. They were let go because I had earlier said I could not identify them.
It is this honesty I call into question. Had I thought for one moment, thought to say “yes, I can identify them,” three criminals would be in jail. On all accounts, identifying the assailants would have been a positive force in the universe. I cannot understand why I was so emphatic in the first place. There was no doubt as to who they were. What meaning existed in telling the truth? Would there have been any cost in lying? What value was there in infantile honesty?
What would you have done? In all truthfulness - without which thought exercises are meaningless - would you have positively identified the assailants, leading to a criminal conviction? If so, would it have been a lie? Would it have been immoral?