I asked him, finally, what specific crime he believed I had committed. I did not ask it rhetorically. I asked it because I wanted an answer, and because I have spent my career insisting that specificity matters. A person should know what he is accused of. A person should not be detained on the basis of a category and a feeling. Brennan did not give me a specific crime. He repeated the description. He said I matched. He said there had been a theft. He did not connect the theft to me with any fact beyond my presence, my sweater, my build, my race, my age. He did not say I had been seen taking a laptop. He did not say a witness had identified me. He said I matched, and in his voice matching was enough.
By then, I had lost track of exact minutes, but I knew the stop had stretched. It had begun as a brief interruption near a junction and had become something else, a prolonged detention conducted in public, in full view of travelers who were trying not to stare and staring anyway. I was aware of the passage of time not by a clock but by the accumulation of small indignities, each one adding a minute to the encounter, each one making it harder to walk away and pretend it had been routine. Fourteen minutes. That is the number I would later fix on, because fourteen minutes is long enough to know that you are not being briefly checked and released. Fourteen minutes is long enough for a crowd to gather, for a story to form in the minds of onlookers, for an officer to become committed to the idea that he must find something, because otherwise he has spent fourteen minutes detaining a man for nothing.
Brennan ordered a second pat-down. He said it as if the first had been a rehearsal and this one would be thorough. I raised my arms. I did it slowly, deliberately, the way a man raises his arms when he wants to make it unmistakably clear that he is cooperating. My hands were open. My palms were facing outward. I was not holding anything. I was not reaching for anything. I was standing with my arms up in an airport concourse, a federal judge in a dark sweater, being patted down for a second time because a first pat-down had not produced a laptop I did not have. The absurdity of it would have been funny if it had not been so exposing. I could feel the eyes of travelers on me, and I could feel, more acutely, the eyes of Brennan, who was patting me down with a concentration that suggested he expected to find something he had missed, something that would justify the minutes already spent.
He reached my jacket, and his hand paused. He felt something hard and rectangular inside the inner pocket, a shape that was not a phone and not a wallet, and his body changed. His posture tightened. His hand stopped moving. He looked up at me, and he asked what it was. I said, "My identification." I said it plainly, because that is what it was. Inside my jacket was my judicial credential holder, the leather case that holds my identification as a federal judge, the thing I carry when I travel to official events. I had not mentioned it earlier because I had not been asked about it, and because I had already told him who I was and he had not seemed to hear it. Now he was asking, and I was answering, and for a moment I thought the encounter might resolve itself in the way encounters are supposed to resolve when a fact is finally named.
Brennan did not take my word for it. He looked at the shape in my jacket, and then at me, and he said, "Take it out slowly." I remember those four words with a precision that has not faded, because they were both an instruction and a test. Take it out slowly. I understood what he was asking. He was asking me to reach inside my jacket, to retrieve the credential holder, to show him what it was, and to do it in a way that would not alarm him. I understood, too, that the slowness was part of the instruction, not an optional flourish. He wanted deliberation. He wanted visibility. He wanted no sudden movement. I intended to give him exactly that.