Later, after the beating, after the intimidation by police, after the hours and hours spent going through legal documents and telling our story at depositions, after the media fixed us in its gaze and then released us, people still asked us the question. It's always the same question—they want reassurances that what happened to us couldn't happen to them.
"Why did those cops attack you?"
Sometimes it's an honest query; other times it sounds more like an accusation. It's the same sort of question people ask when victims like Ferguson's Michael Brown are killed by the police—what did they to do deserve being targeted?
More than four years after our attack, we still don't know the answer. And we're unable to reassure anyone, regardless of the color of their skin, that what happened to us won't happen to them. All we know is that when we attempted to fight back we found out just how deeply dysfunctional the system can be.
