Street hassle
Poet’s unjust arrest reveals racial tensions in Portland
By Dina Marguerite Jacir
On a Wednesday in early December last year, Juba Zaki left his apartment on Munjoy Hill and walked downtown, hoping to make a few bucks playing drums for passersby. He’d borrowed a friend’s djembe and brought along his own cajón, a box drum also handy for sitting.
He started outside the Starbucks on Exchange Street, then moved up to Monument Square, looking for a busier spot. The sidewalk in front of the public library looked promising, so he moved across the street and put his hat on the ground upside-down.
“I made sure not to lean on the wall, because of the sign that says ‘no sitting on wall,’” Zaki, 34, recalled. “Immediately people started giving me dollars … most of them Somali people. I was saying hi to people, to kids and stuff. Before I knew it, this guy in plainclothes was like, ‘Uh, yeah, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’”
The man identified himself as a library security guard. Zaki asked him if people in the library had complained, and was told there had been no complaints but he still had to move along. He accused Zaki of “panhandling” and threatened to call the police. Zaki suggested he do that. He’d seen five cruisers pass since he’d been there, the cops inside apparently unconcerned about his presence.
The guard flagged down two officers who approached Zaki and demanded identification. Zaki refused. He’d been through this twice before in the three years he’s been living in Portland: cops stopping him for flimsy reasons, demanding ID, making a scene. “I told ’em they was gonna have to arrest me, because it was totally stupid: surrounding me for playing a drum in front of the library.”
One of the cops asked Zaki if he had any weapons. Zaki said no, but as the officer recounted in the incident report, Zaki had gotten up from the box drum during the encounter and was “standing in front of me agitated.”
The cop decided to search him anyway. “I touched his right wrist and he told me in a loud voice not to touch him,” the report states. So both cops moved in, each grabbing an arm. Zaki didn’t fight back, but he didn’t make it easy for them, either. “I definitely resisted them, just to let them know you can’t just put your hands on me and force me to the fuckin’ ground,” he said.
A city worker saw the officers struggling with Zaki and jumped in, tackling all three to the sidewalk and assisting as the cops handcuffed him. “I just started screaming, ‘I’m being arrested for playing music in front of the public library!’” Zaki said. “I screamed it like five times.”
The police confiscated the drums, Zaki’s hat and the money he’d made that day, and brought him to the Cumberland County Jail. Charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest, Zaki was released on $240 bail under the condition he stay away from the library. A disorderly conduct charge was later added to the other two charges.
On Jan. 15, Zaki got his day in court. The Cumberland County District Attorney’s representative offered him a plea bargain: pay a $200 fine and they’d drop the criminal trespassing charge, he said. Zaki declined it. So the prosecutor backed off and made another offer: plead no contest to trespassing and they’d give him $200 of his bail money back and drop the other charges. Zaki agreed. His property was returned and he is no longer banned from the library.
The office of Cumberland County D.A. Stephanie Anderson did not return a call seeking comment. Acting Portland Police Chief Joe Loughlin also failed to respond to a request for comment.
Ironically, had Zaki refused to plea to anything, the trespassing charge is the one prosecutors would have found impossible to prove.
In 2005, the Portland City Council addressed the issue of street artists and musicians on public sidewalks and in public parks, clarifying the ordinance and relaxing permit requirements. So long as an artist or performer leaves at least four feet for wheelchairs and pedestrians to pass, they are free to make, perform or sell their work on any city sidewalk.
“Street performers are engaged in artistic expression, which is among the highest forms of protected speech under the First Amendment,” Zachary Heiden, legal director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. The MCLU pushed for the reforms four years ago.
For some reason, library officials have been under the impression the sidewalk in front of the public library is less public than other sidewalks or public squares in town. PPL Executive Director Stephen Podgajny said the matter was “clarified” by city legal staff only recently, in mid-January. The clarification roughly coincided with Zaki’s court appearance, but Podgajny, who said he was not aware of the case, said it was unrelated to the incident.
“Our understanding had been that [sidewalk activities] would interfere” with the library’s operations, “and it was not public space,” said Podgajny. That misunderstanding was fostered, in part, by the fact similar activities have long taken place across Congress Street in Monument Square. But Podgajny conceded there’s “no logic in that connection. Either it’s public or it isn’t.”
“It is clear now, if it wasn’t before, that certainly the sidewalk space, as well as the entryway in and around the library, is public space,” said city attorney Gary Wood.
City Councilor Dave Marshall said he became concerned last summer after hearing of several incidents in which street artists, performers and others exercising their right to free speech on public property were allegedly harassed by police. He brought the issue to the PPD’s attention, and “by the end of the summer last year, I felt as through we had taken some strides,” Marshall said. “But every year we have new officers” who may not understand the law, he added.
Marshall, a painter who frequently makes and sells his work on public byways, said he encourages fellow street artists and performers to become acquainted with the city ordinance that protects their rights and to cite the law when challenged by cops or shopkeepers. “Some of that is educating the police department and some of it is educating artists what their rights are,” he said.
Zaki’s not convinced reciting city code will end the kind of harassment he claims to have experienced in Portland. Two years ago, Zaki said he was in the Old Port when seven cops and two cruisers suddenly swarmed and surrounded him. The police demanded identification, claiming Zaki “fit the description of someone they were looking for,” he said. Zaki produced his ID and was allowed to move on, but was deeply embarrassed by the public confrontation.
“It’s an alienating feeling,” he said. “It’s like I don’t belong here.”
Several months later, Zaki got into the passenger seat of a female friend’s car on Grant Street and noticed there were officers in the area. “I knew the cops were going to fuck with me,” he said, so he put on his seat belt and waited. “Sure enough, three blocks later, the cops pull her over.”
Rather than address the driver directly, Zaki said the officers, who claimed one of the car’s brake lights was out, came to his side of the car and demanded his ID in addition to her license and registration. The friend complied, but Zaki refused. “I said, ‘You’re pulling [us] over for a routine traffic stop. I don’t have to show you my ID.’”
Zaki said the officer began lecturing him about his “attitude.” “He was talking to me like I wouldn’t understand English or something,” he said. (In fact, Zaki, who grew up in New York and Washington D.C., has an exceptional command of the English language despite a tendency to use street slang. One of the top spoken-word poets in Maine, he won a place on Portland’s slam poetry team last year and helped the squad make a strong showing at a national slam-poetry competition in Wisconsin last summer.)
The officers moved on without further incident, after which Zaki and his friend checked the brake lights: both were in working order.
“I’m not trying to stir up no racial bullshit, but I do feel like a man should be able to carry on his business day to day without having to identify himself at every turn,” Zaki said. He said he’s heard numerous accounts of similar harassment from other black people in Portland.
Rachel Talbot Ross, president of the Portland chapter of the NAACP and the city of Portland’s Director of Equal Opportunity and Multicultural Affairs, did not respond to a request for comment.
Zaki isn’t convinced the library guard who accosted him was necessarily motivated by racism. “I think drumming in general brings up emotions for people,” he said. “It’s definitely an emotional expression. Maybe some people don’t know how to deal with those emotions, and don’t want to deal with ’em.”
Bollard editor Chris Busby contributed reporting to this article.
