Tiara Brown is quite the story. More than enough of one that two documentary filmmakers noticed.
After all, she's been a champion amateur and professional boxer, raised by two women, and has been a police officer in Washington, D.C., for five years.
Brown, a 32-year-old Fort Myers native, recently was featured in the 15-minute "Gloves Off" short film through Queen Latifah's the Queen Collective, a program developed in partnership with Procter & Gamble and Tribeca Studios to "accelerate gender and racial equality" and shown online by BET Networks.
More: Boxing champ Tiara Brown brings her first professional title belt home to Fort Myers
Brown was contacted by the filmmakers in January, and filming started in February. Obviously a lot has happened in the world since then. Production had to be adapted after the coronavirus pandemic in mid-March. A couple of months after that, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25 sparked protests for racial justice against police brutality, rioting in cities, and calls in some parts of the country to defund police departments.
"Everything (with the film) was over with," Brown said. "It's just wild, but it actually just fit in like a puzzle piece.
"I've only heard positives from people all around the world, sending messages that I don't even know, 'We wish there were more cops like you.'"
"Gloves Off" co-directors Nadine Natour and Ugonna Okpalaoka chose Brown to highlight Black women "wearing different masks; developing one persona during working hours contrasted by another persona once comfortably in the confines of safe, Black spaces."
Originally, the short film was supposed to premiere during the New York Film Festival, but that was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
"We’ve been following her story to show how she is succeeding in spaces that weren’t set up for her to succeed," Natour said in an interview on BET.com. "We were really drawn to her story when we first discovered it and after speaking to Tiara and getting a sense of her charisma and magnetism and the genuine care she has for the two spheres of her life, we really felt like her story was an important one to share."
"Tiara has a tenacity that is just inspiring," Okpalaoka said. "She’s had every challenge you can think of thrown her way but what really left an impression on us was, the very first time we met, she had a huge smile, very bubbly, very high energy and she kept that same demeanor throughout our experiences with her."
Making a difference as a police officer
Brown isn't conflicted in her approach to her job, despite what has been going on regarding racial justice and police brutality.
That doesn't mean she's in denial about it.
"Not every cop is a bad apple, but all it takes is one bad apple to ruin it for everybody," Brown said. "All it takes is one. You can have 1,000 good ones.
"Now we are probably Enemy No. 1. It really breaks my heart. People hate us."
Brown said many police officers are wary because people pull out their smartphones and start taking video even when they don't understand what's going on during an interaction between police and the public. She said in one instance, someone had called the police, and they showed up to talk with them on the sidewalk, then others started taking video.
"It's not cool," she said. "It's really not fair. We don't deserve that. We're still held to a standard. We're supposed to serve and protect.
"They're saying 'We don't want you. We don't need you.' They're doing the same way they don't like to be profiled. Other people are doing the profiles — 'All of you are bad. All of you are dangerous.' You have a lot of cops, they are going to stop caring. You're not allowing them to help. You've broken a good cop who is actually a good cop. We're still people. We still have feelings and emotions. People act like we don't."
When Brown spoke Wednesday, she said there had been 15 homicides in 10 days in Washington, including a 19-year-old, 20-year-old, and an 11-year-old, all killed in situations not involving the police.
"Where's the outcry. Where's the rage? The cops didn't do it," Brown said.
Brown knows that outrage, personally. In 2010, her brother Jermaine, who had fallen into a bad crowd, was murdered at the age of 21. Her frustration over what she said was inaction by the justice system was part of what drove her to become a police officer. Brown wanted to make a difference that way. So now when she sees the movement to defund police departments, she wonders what a world without police will look like.
"Crime is not going to stop," she said. "Get rid of the police? They're not seeing the big picture. Then what? Who's going to stop the crime? Who's going to come save the day when somebody breaks in your home?"
Brown does have a thought on where a problem exists, though.
"I understand what they're saying," she said. "But I think the justice system is corrupt. I can't even say it's broken. It needs to be done over, redone."
Brown, who in one 30-day stretch had only three days off and was working 17- or 18-hour shifts, was somehow able to avoid working at the protests, some of which turned violent, even though she was scheduled to. Her partner contracted the coronavirus, so Brown was quarantined.
"I just think God didn't want me down there," said the 5-foot-7 Brown, who had a friend on the force have his nose and eye socket broken when he was struck with a skateboard during one of the protests.
Boxing — the passion that won't end
Brown was a star cross country and track and field athlete at Fort Myers High School, good enough to earn a scholarship to Columbus State in Georgia, where she completed a degree in criminology.
Brown overcame a learning disability and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, so the energy transferring into boxing made sense.
"Boxing is like my No. 1 passion," she said. "I will never quit regardless of who wants me to. If you've got to live, live and be happy. If not, what's the point?
"Boxing is my joy and it makes me happy."
Brown was a USA Boxing national champion and world champion in China in 2012, and won the national championship again in 2014 when she won a bronze medal in the world championships. She won the national title for a third time in 2015.
That set up what Brown hoped would be fulfilling an Olympic dream.
She didn't make it on the U.S. Olympic Team, though, falling just short at the trials in the 132-pound division for the 2016 Rio Olympics. In the short film, Brown said she quit Team USA because she felt profiled since others — usually white blondes — were being featured in magazines and other media, instead of her.
Brown turned professional, and is 10-0 with six knockouts, winning the North American Boxing Organization’s super featherweight championship in 2019.
"It's rare that you see a fighter who's totally dedicated and committed to the sport," Brown's trainer, Ernesto Rodriguez, a former police officer, said in the film. "I can say that she is.
"Tiara has all of the characteristics to be a superstar. It's just getting her on the stage where the whole world can see what I see."
Brown was preparing for her next fight in March. But the pandemic canceled that.
It did not cancel her passion or her training.
"I bought a heavy bag for my apartment," she said. "I always have to work out."
And she has no plans on quitting.
"I don't see myself retiring until I see myself retiring, period," she said.
Film star?
Partly due to the pandemic, Brown didn't get to see much of what was going on post-production. Nakour and Okpalaoka would send her clips every now and then. But there was a picture they sent that stands out.
"It's really just amazing out of like of hundreds of thousands of people she made my story a part of one of her Queen Collectives," Brown said. "I couldn't really wrap my mind around it. It didn't really hit me until they sent me pictures of Queen Latifah with them, with pictures of me on the table. They were discussing me. That really hit me. Where does that happen?"
Nakour and Okpalaoka were just drawn by Brown's demeanor as much as her story.
"Everyone around her and her closest family and friends will tell you the same, that Tiara is someone that brings a light into whatever room she walks into and you wouldn’t know that she’s been through half of the things she has," Okpalaoka said. "That’s something that I personally admire and something I think has resonated with me since getting to know her."
Regardless of the disruptions in the world around her, Brown will keep the same approach to her job. She's known as "Officer Friendly" and was named the District of Columbia Officer of the Year in 2019. Last week, she bought three 35-bottle cases of water and distributed it to the homeless. Wednesday, she bought a pizza for a homeless man.
"It's a really hard time," she said. "I try to stay positive and do what I do.
"All I can do is be me and try to show people that there is hope."
Greg Hardwig is a sports reporter for the Naples Daily News and The News-Press. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter: @NDN_Ghardwig, email him at ghardwig@naplesnews.com. Support local journalism with this special subscription offer at https://ift.tt/39CN4I4
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