Handcuffed Talent
Search in society’s cracks for those who think outside the box
Fruitvale Station is the dramatized account of the death of Oscar Grant, a 22 year old African-American man who died in police custody.
Three officers in the Bay Area’s BART System police detained him along with other minority passengers for fighting on board a BART subway train outboard toward Oakland’s Twelfth Street. The lead officer at the scene decided he resisted their actions although that case for the charge was never made in the movie or the actual video of the incident. He demanded Grant be brought into custody. Later investigation revealed that this officer’s aggressive manner escalated the situation into what led to Grant’s death.
According to court documents, in the process of putting Grant in handcuffs who was then face down on the ground, the arresting officer went for his TASER and instead accidentally grabbed his gun. Grant died about seven hours later after surgery removing the point blank range gunshot.
Oscar Grant’s story is of a young, African-American man working to get his life together. The movie indicates that he served time earlier; post prison, his boss fired him for not being punctual at work. Published reports describe his vocation as butcher.
The story is also about another life snuffed out during the arrest process. Reading between the lines, the savvy business leader will see it as another lost resource to society.
Fruitvale Station demonstrates a host of those lives that are trying to make it. They really do not fit into the regimen of society as the more successful people do and often they are trying to make it to a minimum standard. They hit just one wall or another. They are there and they are there every day. If they get arrested, they end up with a criminal offender record that puts them deeper into the cracks that consume them, even if they are not guilty.
Untapped Talent in the Inner City
Many are talented individuals whose skills do not match the normal track of society. They never thought in the box so thinking outside the box is the norm for them.
Their numbers are legion and they struggle every day. One young adult I know of needed to move a car from Boston to another city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He just got a new job as a driver for a dry cleaning company. Having no resources to transport the vehicle, he “borrowed” the license plate of the van he was driving for the company. Unfortunately, a keen Massachusetts State Police officer noticed that the small vehicle had a commercial license plate on it. He stopped them and they were caught — he and his friend. The trooper arrested them.
It was a minor issue in the long run. However, the dry cleaning company fired him immediately. The employer did not realize that he used maybe unconventional resources to do a conventional job because he did not have the money to do things the right way.
Such members of our society see things differently. They are immediately cast aside but maybe they are an untapped resource that can vastly improve your output and help you move ahead of the competition without breaking or bending the law. When they fall through the cracks in the system their talent cannot benefit of society. They become the marginalized.
Another inner city man grew up in a rough city and in a rough environment. He had little direction and got into gang life. If you live in the suburbs and watch those documentaries of gang life for your entertainment, understand that for everyone in a gang it is a dead end economically. When these people cannot get jobs, you pick up the tab with your tax money. Those documentaries do not help you or them.
He did well working at Logan Airport in Boston in the food service industry. Unfortunately, he explained the place where he worked was right next to the door the terrorists walked through to hijack the two planes from Boston that struck the World Trade Center Towers. He was in so much shock that he could not work in the airport again. That to say nothing about the fact that Logan was closed by government mandate that day and was the last to reopen.
He came to me asking for assistance in getting a job. Boston is surrounded by universities and one put out an advertisement for skilled workers in their food services. I encouraged him to go to check it out. He looked into it and was excited about the idea and went to apply.
He related to me that he was honest in his interview about his history but also his work history was good. He explained to me that they could not hire him because of his police record.
They told him, he explained: “This is a world class university and people come from all over the world to attend here,” for that reason he said they could not hire anyone with a criminal offender record.
He later died on the street, unarmed, shot by an acquaintance during an argument.
His name comes to mind every time I see these university students demanding change in our government. Maybe they need to protest their own universities to be leaders in changing hiring policies. The system that these university students enter and fund while piling up their own student debt is the same system that keeps the young, inner city person of color unemployed if they maintain those policies.
His brother, whom I have not seen since his funeral, was a musical genius. He could play anything by ear and never took a music lesson. He too was lost in the inner city life at the time.
How Arrest Records Hurt Society
Every time people are arrested, it goes on their records. If they are booked, each booking photo becomes a public record that some use to legally extort them later. It is a system that puts people further into those cracks and keeps them there.
Some people are so broken, they cannot live outside the prison system but others society tries to rehabilitate and reform so they can work successfully in our economy. That means they must learn not to think outside the box. However, is not there a middle ground: thinking outside of the box without being outside the law?
I remember I spoke with a black man who just got out of prison for dealing drugs. “I have no talent, what kind of job can I do?”
I told that him he has experience in sales. It may have been illegal sales but it was still sales.
Freakonomics reported several years ago that organized crime has the same hierarchical structure as any other retail organization. The difference is how they operate within their illegal structure. The sales manager who sees a formerly incarcerated man or woman as a criminal and not a person who has experience in sales may lose a great asset.
There is great talent among the inner city disadvantaged young adults, untapped and raw talent. Few see it because they fall through the cracks. The people who apply successfully for their jobs are those who made it through the system and became molded in the system. That means, by default, they think inside the box.
Every person who dies in police custody is more than a loss of that one person. Obviously, it affects the family that suffered the death of a valued member. What untapped talent exists among those who fall into societal cracks that will never be mined? What untapped talent did society lose when Oscar Grant died? This does not include talent lost on the street to crime or ostracization outside of police custody. The entrepreneur who understands and is able to mine that talent will be a rising tide that lifts all boats and lives as well.