THE DISENCHANTMENT OF BRANDON

He Used To Want To Grow Up To Be A Police Officer. Living In What He Feels
Is The Occupied Territory Of A St. Petersburg Neighborhood Has Changed All That

ST. PETERSBURG - As a boy, Brandon Hutchinson was transfixed by television
episodes of Cops and CHiPs and movies like RoboCop.

"I wanted to be a police officer so bad," he says. "They seemed so good,
doing all the right things, catching the bad people."

He pictured himself, Officer Hutchinson, arriving at his family reunion in
uniform astride his department motorcycle. Relatives would look on proudly.

"I flushed that dream right down the toilet," Brandon, now 16, says. "When
somebody says police to me, I think nasty, snotty, mean crackers."

How could a young man go so quickly from admiring the cops on his TV screen
to hating the ones right outside the front door?

The answer can be found in what Brandon sees on the other side of that
door, in his own experience, and in the long, contentious relationship
between black Americans and the police.

Brandon lives in St. Petersburg's Childs Park neighborhood, where those
relationships have been especially strained lately. Tensions climaxed last
month after someone threw bricks, bottles and rocks at police and cruisers
at a neighborhood park. Police arrested seven people.

The confrontation came a week after prosecutors cleared white Pinellas
sheriff's Deputy Christopher Taylor in the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old
black man in April. After Jarrell Walker's killing, someone printed
T-shirts that read "WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE." Below that grave solicitation
was: "Chris Taylor killed 1 of ours. Now 1 of his must die!"

"It's a way to release anger," Brandon says of the T-shirt.

"It's getting to a point where I would expect a police officer to be shot
at or something to happen to him," he says resignedly. "It wouldn't
surprise me at all. They're just getting tired of it."

Not every Childs Park resident shares Brandon's viewpoint. Many welcome the
officers in their neighborhood. But the way Brandon sees it, they amount to
an unwelcome occupying force.

Here's why he gave up on the police.

Brandon's dream of becoming a police officer began disintegrating after he,
his mother and younger brother moved to Childs Park nearly six years ago.
The neighborhood is bordered by First Avenue S, 22nd Avenue S, 34th Street
and 49th Street.

He soon became aware of the heavy police presence in Childs Park, which is
plagued by street-level drug dealing. He saw cops staked out on his street.
Speeding through the neighborhood. Cruising after dark with their
headlights off. He came to believe that officers see him the way they see
others like him: as a potential suspect.

Even some of his innocuous fashion choices - oversized white T-shirts,
baggy jeans, 'do rags - seem to draw unwarranted attention from police,
Brandon feels.

Just the other week, he and some friends, sitting in front of his house,
watched as an unmarked cruiser drove by as many as seven times.

On another recent evening, an officer parked his cruiser and sat watching a
high school graduation celebration at a nearby home - even though there
were no disruptions, Brandon says.

Brandon and his friends swap stories about being stopped - without cause,
they say - by the police. They've been questioned and searched. Brandon
says cruisers slow to a crawl as officers appraise him suspiciously.
Officers have made sarcastic comments implying he peddles drugs, he says.

"They treat us all like we're drug dealers," says Brandon, who begins his
junior year this fall at St. Petersburg High School. He also runs track in
a summer league. "I guess because we're black and live in Childs Park. But
all of us aren't drug dealers. All black men aren't drug dealers."

In the aftermath of Walker's killing, one speaker at a meeting with Sheriff
Jim Coats likened police presence in mostly black neighborhoods like Childs
Park to the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

"I'm really trying to make it so I can get my mama and brother out of
here," Brandon says.

Garlynn Boyd coaches the Lightning Bolt Youth Track Club that Brandon
belongs to. She believes Brandon's feelings are influenced by the long
history of tense relations between African-Americans and the police.

"It's been going on with us since slavery," she said. "You had sheriffs who
were part of the Ku Klux Klan and riding at night and terrorizing us. It's
been going on with us for years and years and years."

The police shootings of TyRon Lewis in 1996 ("a mother's son," she says)
and Walker ("a child's father") only perpetuate that history, she says.

"(The police) know (Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney) Bernie McCabe, internal
affairs, the chief, whoever, is going to exonerate them," Boyd said. "They
know they're not going to get into trouble so they don't have any fear.
They know they can do it and get away with it. It's just another
African-American, or "n-----,' that's dead. They don't care."

And so, children like Brandon abandon any aspirations to become police
officers.

"People are tired and frustrated," Boyd said. "It's a sore that's festering
and festering and festering. If this city doesn't watch out, they're going
to have another riot."

Leaning against his front porch banister, Brandon watches a sleek dark-blue
sports car pass his house and stop a couple of doors away. The car, driven
by a hurried middle-aged white man, turns around, drives by Brandon's home
again and stops in front of a house across the street.

The driver taps the horn once. Seconds later, a black man wearing a
football jersey emerges from the house and walks toward the car. He waves
the driver toward a dirt-paved alley several yards away, where both men
disappear.

"I know a base head when I see a base head," Brandon says. "White people
come over here to buy their rocks. By now he's hit the interstate back to
his house to smoke his rocks."

Brandon believes this kind of quiet midmorning encounter is the source of
the commotion between some residents and police in black neighborhoods.
Open-air transactions like this one attract "heat," he says.

In the war against street-level dealers, Brandon sympathizes with the
dealers. One, he says, is a cousin who's now in jail. Brandon grew up
around others in Childs Park who he says have dealt drugs out of necessity.

"I know some drug dealers - I'm not going to say any names - and most of
them around here haven't had it easy," he says. "Some of them couldn't even
finish school because it was so bad at home. There was nothing else they
could see to do at that time but hustle."

But he adds: "Some are just dumb.... They just choose the fast life."

His cousin is in jail for making "wrong decisions." Brandon visited him
recently. "He was telling me that I really need to stick it out and stay in
school because jail is not anything fun."

Brandon has never been in serious trouble. He was arrested once on a
misdemeanor charge after a scuffle in seventh grade, but adjudication was
withheld.

He doesn't need to see unemployment statistics to tell you how hard it is
for young black men to find jobs.

"Some of my friends used to go around here cutting people's grass," says
Brandon, who worked most recently at a fast-food restaurant. "After a while
you just get tired of it. You get tired of walking around here in the hot
sun with no money in your pocket wearing the same clothes for a week, week
and a half. You don't have any food at your house. You don't even want to
be home."

From his front porch, Brandon has often stared up at the stars, wondering
how his life would change if he decided to make some quick money selling
drugs. He says his mother, a factory worker, earns just enough to pay bills
and provide food. (His father, whom Brandon says he rarely sees, lives in
Gainesville.)

Guys in the neighborhood who manage, without jobs, to drive fancy cars with
expensive paint jobs don't escape his attention.

"The drug dealers are the only people you know that can get up when they
want, do what they want, when they feel like doing it and how they feel
like doing it and nobody will say anything to them," Brandon says. "Buy
what they want, when they want it, how many times they want it."

But he says he resists the temptation with the help of his mother and his
grandmother, who lives nearby and would "cry, have a heart attack and die"
if he sold drugs.

He wants to get the nice things by making it big as a football player. "My
drive is to be a somebody. My biggest fear is not being anything in life."

He says he realizes not all police officers are bad.

"Every now and then you run across a good white officer with a good
attitude," Brandon says. "But it's rare."