On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Read Online Free PDF Page A

car came
     up as stolen in California. Chuck had a pretty good idea which one of his girlfriend’s
     relatives had stolen the car, but he didn’t say anything. “Wasn’t going to help,”
     he said.
    The officer took both brothers into custody, and down at the police station they charged
     Chuck with receiving stolen property. They charged Tim with accessory, and later a
     judge in the juvenile court placed Tim on three years of probation.
    With this probation sentence hanging over Tim’s head, any encounter with the police
     might mean a violation and a trip to juvenile detention, so Chuck began teaching his
     little brother how to run from the police in earnest: how to spot undercover cars,
     how and where to hide, how to negotiate a police stop so that he didn’t put himself
     or those around him at greater risk.
    REGGIE
    Chuck and Tim’s middle brother, Reggie, came home for a few months then. He was an
     overweight young man of fifteen, and already developing a reputation as good muscle for robberies. Older guys in the neighborhood referred
     to him as a cannon, meaning a person of courage and commitment. Reggie had heart,
     they said. He wouldn’t back down from danger. Miss Linda described her middle son
     as a goon. Unlike herself and her oldest son, Chuck, Reggie seemed utterly uninterested
     in neighborhood gossip. He didn’t care if someone else was out there making money
     or getting girls—he only cared if
he
was.
    “And he fearless,” she said with some pride. “A stone-cold gangster.”
    Reggie also had a lesser-known artistic side: he wrote rhymes on the outside, and
     penned a number of “’hood” novels while he was locked up.
    When Reggie came home this time, he planned a number of daring schemes to rob armored
     cars or big-time drug dealers, but he could rarely find anyone around 6th Street willing
     to team up with him. “Niggas be backing out at the last minute!” he lamented to me,
     half-jokingly. “They ain’t got no heart.”
    Chuck tried to discourage Reggie from these robberies, but Reggie didn’t seem to have
     the patience for making slow money selling drugs hand to hand, so he contributed only
     sporadically to the household. “My brother’s the breadwinner,” he acknowledged.
    A month after he turned fifteen, Reggie tested positive for marijuana at a routine
     probation meeting. (This is referred to as a piss test, and when you test positive,
     it is called hot piss.) The probation board issued him a technical violation, and
     instead of allowing them to take him into custody, Reggie ran out of the building.
     They soon issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
    That evening, Reggie explained that there was no point in turning himself in, because
     being in juvenile detention is much worse than living on the run.
    “How long are you going to be on the run for?” I asked.
    “Till I turn myself in.”
    “That’s what you’re going to do?”
    “No, that’s something I
could
do, but I’m not.”
    “Yeah.”
    “’Cause what happened last time I turned myself in? Time.”
    “Last time when you got locked up you had turned yourself in?”
    “Did I.” 1
    “How long did you sit before your case came up?”
    “Like nine months.”
    During the time Reggie was on the run from this probation violation, he also became
     a suspect in an armed robbery case, so the police issued a body warrant—an open warrant
     for those accused of committing new crimes—for his arrest. The robbery had been caught
     on tape, and the footage was even aired on the six o’clock news. The cops began driving
     around the neighborhood with Reggie’s picture and asking people to identify him. They
     raided his mother’s house in the middle of the night, and the next morning Reggie
     told me:
    Yo, the law ran up in my crib last night talking about they had a body warrant for
     a armed robbery. I ain’t rob nobody since I had to get that bail money for my brother
     last year. . . . They