"Finally, the DMV told me that I wasn’t the victim of identity theft; there was simply another Lisa S Davis with the same birthday in New York City. Our records were crossed. When cops run a license, they don’t check the person’s address, signature, or social security numbers. They check the name and the birthday, and both the other Lisa S Davis’s and mine were the same. We were, in the eyes of the law, one person, caught in a perfect storm of DMV and NYPD idiocy...
I convinced her to give me copies of all the unpaid tickets and scoured them for clues. Who were these Lisa Davises and why were they in trouble? Lisa Davis in East New York had jaywalked, but never paid the fine. Lisa Davis on the Bed Stuy/Bushwick border had an unleashed dog. Lisa Davis in Clinton Hill had an open container. So did two different Lisa Davises with different home addresses in the Soundview area of the South Bronx, as did a Lisa Davis near the Gun Hill Houses in the Bronx. Lisa Davis in East Harlem got a disorderly conduct citation for fighting. So did Lisa Davis in Bed-Stuy. Lisa Davis in Harlem was trespassing (code for shoplifting), though the cop’s handwriting was so hard to read that I couldn’t discern the details. I could read the defendant’s statement, though: “I just needed some soap.”...
It was then that it became clear to me: the reason for the tickets wasn’t that these Lisa Davises were petty criminals. The reason was likely that they lived in highly policed areas where even the smallest infractions are ticketed, the sites of “Broken Windows” policing. The reason, I thought, was that they weren’t white.
That could have been the “proof” I offered to the judge. Brownsville’s population is less than 1% white. It almost couldn’t have been me. My neighborhood, though fairly diverse (and cheap) when I moved there in the early 90s, is now 76% white. I have never heard of anyone getting tickets in my neighborhood for any of the infractions committed by the Lisa Davises in neighborhoods of color."
Okay, so, don't be this woman so excited that a black woman called her an "ivory twin", or feeling like you know what it is to be non-white because you also had to deal with the criminal justice system being absurd at you.
But, this is an interesting story about obtaining about identity and how that functions in intersection with the government
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