Five days after the New Year’s Eve ball drop and publication of a 300-plus-page report, the senior justice addresses reporters in a firm voice. “Random street checks should end as there is little evidence to show this policing practice is useful in reducing crime, while it disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous and racialized groups.”
My friend, a long-time Somali community activist, shrugs. “It’ll end up gathering dust on a bookshelf, like all the others.”
twilight chill
a cop's shadow cuts through
a black teen
Featured in Haibun Gallery of haikuKATHA, October 8 2026
Chen-ou Liu
Commentary by Vidya Premkumar: The haibun places the official language of reform against the lived knowledge of a community that has heard such promises before. The friend’s shrug is devastating precisely because it is so restrained, turning the bookshelf into a graveyard of reports and recommendations. The title works on several levels, pointing to race, embodiment and the inescapable fact that a person is read by the skin he inhabits before he is heard as an individual. The haiku compresses that larger institutional history into one immediate image, where the cop’s shadow becomes an extension of surveillance falling across a young body. What makes the ending linger is the distance between policy language and the black teen standing beneath it, exposed to the same old shadow.
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