Rashad Turner had wanted to be a cop for his entire life — then he was arrested on weapons charges for a BB gun in the backseat of his car, and the police he was working for called him 'dirty.' He founded a Black Lives Matter chapter in St. Paul instead.
On a hot day recently, standing at the edge of St. Paul's Indian Mounds Regional Park amid the crackling of fireworks, he explained why."I remember a time when I was 18," he says."I had these tight gray umpire pants on.
" Turner was an intern at the St. Paul Police Department. He was driving home from umpiring a Little League baseball game. A block from his grandmother's house, he slowed at a stop sign to talk to a young man he recognized from the neighborhood.The kid had been in a fight, Turner says. And as they were talking, police showed up. They checked Turner's backseat and saw a BB gun, which he used for picking off squirrels on the golf course with friends.The officers arrested him and tried to book him on weapons charges. From the back of the car, Turner remembers a message on the police computer display up front. One of the officers he worked with from his internship was talking about him. The words appearing on the display stung."Something like, 'Oh, yeah, that's that intern. I knew he was dirty,'"Turner recalls."It didn't matter that I was putting my blood, sweat and tears into this internship," he says."I was just another n***** to that cop."He completed skills academy, a patrol operations course, and by the fall of 2008, he was married.Rashad Turner, founder of the St. Paul chapter of Black Lives Matter, speaks to supporters before they begin a march against police brutality in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 4 2015.Rashad Turner, founder of the St. Paul chapter of Black Lives Matter, speaks to supporters before they begin a march against police brutality in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 4 2015."I had the shades up in the living room. And she simply asked me, 'Why you got the shades all open like that?'"He was raising his voice, projecting power, amped up to an alarming degree. Turner's"command presence" training — a take-control policing tactic used to demonstrate strength — was drilled into him. He felt it taking over.Later on, they discussed what happened. Something ugly and angry had spilled out.'It was just sort of that last straw' Even still, Turner kept going. He graduated from the police academy in St. Paul. He decided it was time to leave home. He applied for a job in Tulsa, Okla., and went for an interview. He says he aced the written test. A panel interview followed. "I'm doing this oral board, which is basically at the time was a bunch of white guys, like eight white guys sitting around the table — commanders, lieutenants, sergeants."They threw a scenario at him. "They said, 'You get a call to a bank. The bank's just been robbed. They give you the suspect's description. The suspect had a gun. What do you do?'""The suspect's walking towards you. What are you going to do?" they continued.The panel pressed on. The suspect is still coming towards you, he's not complying. Turner says he knew what they wanted to hear.He told them:"I'll discharge my firearm and eliminate the threat while he's still going." He wouldn't stop firing until the threat was eliminated."This was just something I knew they were wanting me to say. But the fact it was just so impressive to them — it was just sort of that last straw."
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