I am listening to the sound of helicopters overhead. Today is the day of civil disobedience over the Sean Bell verdicts. I have not been keeping up with the news, with what has been planned. I saw it last night on the news, briefly, 6 different meet-up points for protests.

This afternoon, with the helicopters whining overhead for the past two hours, I am thinking about them more. Should I go? Not to get arrested, but to be a person in the crowd supporting the Bell family and showing my unhappiness over the verdict, over the reality that three cops, regardless of color, can pump 41 or 50 (will it be 75 next?) bullets into an unarmed 23-year-old black man and get away with it.

I have to pick up dd in half an hour. Will she want to come to the protest? She has been learning about the police in school. Police arrest bad guys; they are here to protect people. If you are lost or in trouble, the police will help you. These lessons make me cringe, but I have not yet worked up the words to talk with her teacher about this approach.

I've never wanted to take dd to a police brutality protest. I remember the funeral of Patrick Dorismond, shot to death by the NYPD after he told an undercover soliciting drugs to get the fuck away from him, that he wasn't a drug dealer even if he was a black man. I remember that the police showed up in riot gear to his funeral and caused a riot. I remember one image--of a mother arrested, handcuffed, led away. Her son, small--was he 5? 7?--was left on the curb, crying from confusion. The camera didn't show anyone else with him. What happened to him?

That image has stayed with me. And, because, in my limited experience, at police brutality protests, the police tend to act, well, brutal. You would think they would want to demonstrate that they aren't, but quite the opposite.

At the same time, Bell's case touches me, angers me. He has a daughter. How old is she? One? Two? She will never get to see her father again. She will never have him tuck her into bed or read her a story or give her a hug and scare away the nightmares. Not only will she never see her father, but she will learn, as she gets older, that there is no justice. Her father's killers are not safely behind bars; they are not off the streets. They are free to walk around, free to go home to their own kids; free to go to work every day and to draw their paychecks and, at the end of 20 years, retire and become school security guards or something else to supplement their retirement income.

How can I *not* go and be a person who raises her voice and say no? How can I *not* take this opportunity to show my daughter the other side of those school lesson plans? That police also brutalize and destroy families, destroy lives. That there is one little girl who will never see her father again because of the police.

Sean Bell's fiancee has been arrested. Demonstrators have blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. I should go and pick up dd now. I wonder if everything will be over by the time we get back downtown. I should bring her and hope that there is not bedlam by the time we arrive.