Ralph Bouquet goes off script during a psychology research study with uncomfortable and revealing consequences.

Ralph Bouquet is the Director of Education and Outreach for NOVA, the PBS science documentary series produced by WGBH in Boston. At NOVA, Ralph’s team supports science educators through the creation of free classroom resources and finds creative ways to engage new audiences for NOVA’s broadcast and digital productions through science communication events around the country. Before NOVA, Ralph taught high school biology and chemistry in Philadelphia and then spent some time in ed-tech at a Boston-based startup. Ralph received his B.A. from Harvard University, and studied secondary science methods and urban education while completing his M.Ed. at UPenn.

This story originally aired on February 1, 2019 in an episode titled “Danger.”

Story Transcript

It’s an unusually warm and clear spring day in Cambridge.  I’m a sophomore in college balancing a burger in one hand and a stack of playing cards in the other.  Members of to black Harvard student groups organized their annual tradition of a spring barbecue in the Quad, the Harvard Quad.  It’s one of the grassy fields in the north part of the campus. 

Now, in this scenario, I am the vice president of the Harvard Black Men’s Forum and we’re one of the organizers of the event, along with our sister organization, The Association of Black Harvard Women and we’re having a good time.  But unbeknownst to us, while we’re playing our games of three-legged races, hopscotch, dodge ball, spades, of course, there are a couple of emails. 

There's an email for it happening in one of the neighboring dorms.  Essentially, several white students have begun to ask why a group of non-Harvard people from Dorchester, of course one of Boston’s historically black neighborhoods, had decided to invade the Harvard Quad and host their event there.  Now, the emails began to pile up and, eventually, somebody decides to call the police.  So we’re there and police show up. 

I've had to prepare myself for interactions with the police at several points throughout my life and every single time there's a complex mix of emotions that I experience.  The first most obvious and palpable emotion that I feel is usually fear, like the fear that I felt when I was ten years old watching a police officer interrogate my dad for having an out-of-state license plate.  We were on a family road trip driving through Indiana, officer made my dad step out of the car.

Occasionally, I also feel this weird mixture of shame and embarrassment.  I felt that a few years ago.  I was driving home from the movie theaters with my two younger sisters when we got into an accident.  This elderly, old white man hit us.  It was a slow collision.  There wasn’t that much damage but he turned.  It was clear he seemed to be a little bit disoriented and confused. 

The officer who shows up on the scene begins interrogating me aggressively, even despite the fact that this old man has repeatedly said that it was his fault that he shouldn’t have been driving at night. 

Sometimes occasionally I feel anger as well.  I felt that anger two years ago.  I was in New Orleans with a couple of friends.  We were at Essence Fest, on our way to the concert.  I remember a police officer almost slammed the door of our car on the leg of one of my friends.  Apparently, we were getting dropped off in our Uber in one of the spots that wasn’t a designated drop off and so, rather than use his words, a cop decided to push the car door close as we were attempting to get out. 

And every single time when these events happen, I’m also cycling through all the speeches and the warnings that most black men at some point in their lives have heard from their parents.  Yet, even after all that, nothing still prepares me for that feeling of seeing two cops on motorcycles park and walk their way towards us, me and my group of friends. 

So the cops show up.  They start asking for some IDs.  We show them IDs.  We show them our paperwork.  Harvard clearly knows we’re supposed to be there.  In fact, the Harvard University Dining Services are actually preparing the burgers and the hotdogs that we’re eating during the course of the event, in between the three-legged races and the games of spades and dominos. 

They leave.  Everything is okay.  But we try to get back to our festivities but it’s kind of hard to have fun after something like that happens to you.  The mood has totally been soured.  Everything has sort of changed.

We get back home, back to the dorms and everybody starts to see those emails and so we’re like, “You know what?  We got to motivate.  We got to get together and do something.” 

So we do a demonstration and we organize the I Am Harvard Campaign.  The premise of this is the radical notion that black students exist at Harvard and deserve to exist there.  But even despite that, we do our campaign, we actually set some demands to the university some of which are still in place.  We ask for more tutors of color, more facilitated discussions around race and discrimination during the freshman year, more diverse administrative staff.  But even after all this, that fear that I feel still stays with me. 

In college, I major in Psychology.  That means I’m involved in quite a few research studies.  In this case, I’m actually working as a confederate in these studies.  Not that type of confederate.  So in psychology, a confederate is a person, usually an actor, who pretends to play the role of a subject in a research study, but in actuality they are actually working alongside the researcher but the other participants usually don’t know that. 

So it’s a year later now after this incident on the Quad and the PI, the principal investigator of the lab that I’m working in approaches me and asks me if I’m interested in a summer job.  She describes what the experiment is.  She's investigating whether increases in cortisol, which is a stress hormone, in response to a stressful social interaction, affects decision making, particularly around threat-related decision making. 

So I’m like, “All right.  That sounds pretty cool.  That sounds good.”

She then lets me know that, in fact, the stressful social situation that she's investigating involves racial bias. 

I’m like, “Okay, interesting.” 

Then she reveals to me the population that she's studying, police officers. 

So I’m like, “All right.  I don't know about this.  I’m a little interested but I’m also a little bit anxious, because here’s an opportunity to do something really cool, to do some really cool research but by engaging in stressful interactions with members of an organization that I've spent my entire life trying to avoid as a black man.” 

But, man, money talks.  When you are broke, all financial aid in college, sometimes you end up picking up some weird jobs. 

So first day of the study, here I am in the Cambridge Police Department.  Got my suit and tie on ready to do this study.  In this study, I’m not a confederate this time.  I’m actually an actor in a role play scenario.  So I’m engaging with police officers in a role play.  They play the role of sergeant who has to deal with a complaint and I’m a young lawyer who’s coming to the police department to make a complaint about another officer who mistreated me poorly.  Let’s call this officer Officer Jones. 

So I walk into the room, and there's always a police officer there hooked up to an EKG and several other physiological monitors.  In addition to cortisol, which is taken via saliva sample, we’re also looking at their heart rate.  We’re measuring their blood pressure as well during this experiment. 

So here’s the role play scenario.  I walk in and I’m a young lawyer.  I describe the scenario and I make my complaint to them.  Here’s my complaint.  A couple of nights ago, I was walking from the bar with a couple of friends.  We just had a few drinks, good time, walking down the street we’re making jokes.  We’re laughing.  Somebody decides to call the cops on us. 

Okay.  I split off from the group and then, while I’m walking away from the group, the police officer who’s called on the scene sees me, approaches me, calls me a drunken son of a bitch, slams me against the car.  He's really aggressive, verbally and physically aggressive with me.  So that’s my complaint. 

Now, usually the police officer there gives me sort of the canned department response, right?  You know, “Sorry about that.  We’re going to look into this.” 

And I retort, “You know what?  What are you all looking into?  I mean, we have witnesses who saw what happened.  Here I am telling you the situation.  Like you all need to do something about this.” 

So we sort of engage in this back and forth, and this is sort of the key stressful interaction. 

Then I flip the switch.  So I have a script that I’m working off of that I memorize and here’s the key line in the script where things really start to get a little testy. 

So at one point I go, “You know what, sergeant, you and I both know this.  Officer Jones treated me the way he did because of my race, because I’m black.  Whoever called the police they called the police because they saw a group of black men walking in their neighborhood and they got nervous.  But guess what?  This is our neighborhood too.  We live here too, okay?”

Now, range of responses happens after I say this line, ranging from reluctant apologies to open antagonistic sort of responses.  I remember in one particular case, this one officer, after I say that line, he looks at me and he rolls his eyes and he goes, “Come on.” 

So then I press him.  Next line is, “Sergeant do you honestly think you would have treated me this way if I was white?” 

He completely shuts down.  He goes, “Okay, buddy.”  Shifts back in his seat, completely checks out for the rest of the role play. 

I’m like, “All right.  Interesting.” 

And it’s one of those interesting moments where I sort of realize that, in many ways, many police officers operate under the full impression that the law will always be on their side because they're in a situation where when one of their own does something bad they get to investigate one of their own. 

That study ends and it’s now my senior year of college and I’m doing what most college seniors do.  I’m trying to live it up.  I've got last bit of college freedom and fun left. 

So I’m at a party.  Maybe the party is a little bit loud.  The music is a little bit too loud than it should be.  Maybe it’s a little bit too late.  Maybe we’re a little bit too close to some other residential housing and so somebody makes a noise complaint and they call the cops.  This time the situation is a little bit different because I’m in a mix-race group of friends.  I've got some of my white male friends with me.  We’re at this party. 

Now, engaging with the police when you’re with your white friends is always a pretty interesting situation.  I’m always baffled by this sudden increase in patience and the second chances and the warnings that seem to get conjured out of thin air. 

In this scenario, I’m really shocked because I’m listening and these white boys are arguing with the cops.  They're yelling at them telling them that they have lawyer dads who will come and do this, who will take their badge numbers. 

And I’m like, I try to be a rational reasonable person.  I’m like, “You know what?  Guys, we’re kind of clearly in the wrong here.  It’s 2:30 a.m. on a Thursday night.  Let’s just wrap this up, pull the plug and go inside and play Smash Bros.  What are we doing here?”

So I decide to, all right, I’m going to go outside and I’m going to see if I can sort of deal with this situation because I happen to be the most sober person in the building. 

So I walk outside and I’m like, “Officers, I’m really, really sorry for this.  Totally we apologize for this.  We’ll shut the music down.  We’ll shut the party down.  We really apologize for causing a disturbance.  This won’t happen again.” 

Then one of the officers looks at me, pauses for a second and he goes, “Hey, aren’t you that asshole from that experiment last summer?” 

In my mind I’m like, “Damn.”  I’m completely shook. 

And in the back of my mind I’m running through all these stories of police retaliation that I've heard growing up.  Of course, this is before smartphones are ubiquitous, before all the faces and the names of the dead black men and women that you now see on your screens used to only be on t-shirts and murals in the communities where I’m from. 

So I’m speechless.  I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to say next and then the officer sort of continues talking and he goes, “You know what?  This prick almost gave me a fucking heart attack last year.” 

The other officers start laughing.  I take their cue and I started laughing too.  I’m nervous.  I’m doing nervous laughter. 

And they start badgering me with questions asking me, “Oh, so how much do you get paid to scare cops, huh?”  I’m just terrified but I’m answering their questions. 

As we start to talk I realize, all right, the tension has started to deflate a little bit.  Maybe I might be able to get out of this.  This might be okay.  But, at the same time, this is one of those moments where I truly begin to realize that this confrontation and the fear that I feel really reveals the freedom and the power that these police officers have to do whatever they want. 

So I apologize.  I go back inside.  My group of friends were inside.  They're completely stunned at what just happened.  But I’m shaking because I don't like these interactions at all.  I wish I could say that after that interaction that my fear of police officers suddenly disappeared but if you've been paying attention to the news, it really didn’t.  It never has for me. 

So I’m inside the house and looking outside the window making sure to see if they’ve left.I hear them laughing as they walk back to the squad cars, pull up and drive off into the night.