I thought my opinion of the authorities could not get any worse.

I had sour feelings about the police at age 15, when I would crouch in an alley at 10:30 on Saturday nights, hiding from police who enforced a strict curfew. The cops would pull their cars onto the sidewalks of Royal Oak, then the suburban Detroit mecca for alienated teenagers like me. Thumbs in belt loops, they sauntered toward us and began the confrontations with loud, disrespectful words.

Seeing teenagers hauled off like criminals forced me to take refuge past 10 p.m., but with angry bitterness. We were just kids talking and laughing, not drinking or sniffing glue reclusively in a suburban bungalow. We weren’t a problem that needed to be confronted with crude trauma.

From that very first attempt to criminalize me, I have always felt helpless anger as my and mostly my male friends’ reputations and wallets were dragged through the courts for petty crimes.

I have felt indignant because of urges from family and friends to be complacent, even when I encounter gross violations of our “rights.” My faith dissolved with the realization that protecting those rights in a legal theater is impossible. Most people would have to starve to afford the kind of legal representation necessary to be taken seriously. Considering that players in the legal system are so often buddies, scarfing burritos at El Azteco together, would they really investigate corruption claims voiced by a punk-looking kid? Never.

Even if the police force open your door without a warrant or a reason and rifle through your things while taunting and laughing “we’re not searching you!” Even if a police officer chokes you and beats you to the ground. Even if beating occurred in public, with adults and children watching.

I know this because these two incidents, among others, have happened to a person close to me in the past few months. Unjustly branded a criminal, he feels forced to leave the town that we came to together to live in more than two years ago. With a trail of police report lies following him, he is off to the East Coast for a well-paying job because his interludes with the police have dampened his morale and destroyed his finances.

I believe, though I was present for only one of the situations, that he did not deserve to be brutalized, arrested and regarded as a danger to our community. I know my relationship with him could render my opinion biased, but evidence points to my conclusion.

I was dozing on the couch of his room in a co-operative house in the very early hours of a Sunday morning in late October when his room was illegally searched and he was arrested. The cops forcefully entered his second-floor room when he was on the first floor, trying to control a party that collapsed into violence when the police had entered another part of the house for still unknown reasons. I demanded they leave because of the illegality of their entrance and they threatened to arrest me.

“We’re you’re elders, we’re just trying to help you,” an older officer barked as I shook in fear in the hallway, flashlight in my eyes. I watched my friend’s things spilling about as the police searched in vain for something to criminalize him for. He cried out in frustration. House members on the first floor stood bleeding, struggling to contain the dwindling partygoers as the police carried out what I believe was a personal vendetta.

A month later, skateboarding on the corner of Albert and M.A.C. avenues as families attended the Winter Festival and Chili Cook-Off, my friend was approached by an officer, who pointed at the “No skateboarding” sign, and my friend complied. But the exchange turned into a confrontation and the police car was soon perched on the sidewalk. I was not there, but I assume my friend’s attitude was not polite because he is so skeptical of police. I know he was not violent and did not warrant the beating and arrest he endured, especially because his “crimes” were nonviolent misdemeanors.

Our community members watched the police officer choke my friend breathless and nobody said a word. A local journalist documented the event with his camera. A picture of the savagery appeared not prominently in the local newspaper, Town Courier, with a story that borrowed completely from the corrupted, false police report.

My friend and I moved here in August 1998 to begin our adult lives. Despite our immaturity, we had a real sense of responsibility. Despite our wandering goals, we were committed to searching for our way to adulthood. We craved support from unarmed elders. We felt moving to a college town and tuning our ears to the voices of scholars would be the ideal rite of passage into the kind of maturity we craved.

We found that in East Lansing, the rite of passage for people like us is to endure a legal system that spits on our pride and takes our money. Really, we should have already known that, because it’s the American way.

How could any community, especially one bulging with intelligentsia, just stand there, mouths agape?

Erica Saelens, State News wire editor, can be reached at saelense@msu.edu.