The Social Advantage of Pockets
“He was trying to get out his ID and his wallet out of his pocket,” Diamond Reynolds explains in a Facebook Live video taken just minutes after her boyfriend, Philando Castile, was shot by police during a traffic stop. Castile had reached for his pockets, where he also had a gun that he was licensed to carry.
“He keeps his wallet in his pocket,” Reynolds tells us.
After shooting Castile, the officers insist that Reynolds “keep [her] hands where they are. … Keep ’em up, keep ’em up!” Her phone is thrown down. With her arms raised in the air, Reynolds asks: “Could you please get my phone for me?” Her 4-year-old daughter says to the officer, “I want to get my mommy’s purse.”
This incident, from July, followed two years of about the ways criminal justice remains entangled with systemic racism. But beyond documenting a violent encounter, Reynolds’s video also reveals the pocket as a key actor. With their persistent demand that hands be “kept up,” the police fear what rests in Castile and Reynolds’s pockets and strip them of their belongings.
