It had been a long night for Shanta Sweatt. After working a 16-hour shift cleaning the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, in Nashville, and then catching the 11:15 bus to her apartment, she just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. Instead, she wound up having a fight with the man she refers to as her “so-called boyfriend.” He was a high-school classmate who had recently ended up on the street, so Sweatt had let him move in, under the proviso that he not do drugs in the apartment. Sweatt has a soft spot for people in trouble. Over the years, she had taken in many of her two sons’ friends, one of whom who had been living with them since his early teens.
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When Sweatt got home that night, early in November of last year, she realized that her boyfriend had been smoking marijuana, probably in front of the kids. She was furious, words were exchanged, and he left. Sweatt finally crawled into bed after midnight, only to be awakened at about 8:30 in the morning by an insistent knock at the door. She assumed that her boyfriend was coming to get his stuff and get out of her life.
When she opened the door, police officers filled the frame, and more were waiting at her back door. She could see that squad cars were swarming the parking lot. “There were 12 to 15 cars,” she told me. “For us.” An officer asked whether they could enter. As a resident of public housing, she wasn’t sure whether she had the right to say no. (She did.) But she was certain that if she refused them, they would come back. She had nothing to hide, so she let them in. “I didn’t get smart or give them a rough time,” she said. “I cooperated.”