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Yes, Black America Fears The Police. Here's Why.03/05/2015 * HuffPo/Salon * By Nikole Hannah-Jones
Last July 4, my family and I went to Long Island to celebrate the holiday with a friend and her family. After eating some barbecue, a group of us decided to take a walk along the ocean. The mood on the beach that day was festive. Music from a nearby party pulsed through the haze of sizzling meat. Lovers strolled hand in hand. Giggling children chased each other along the boardwalk.
Most of the foot traffic was heading in one direction, but then two teenage girls came toward us, moving stiffly against the flow, both of them looking nervously to their right. "He's got a gun," one of them said in a low voice.
I turned my gaze to follow theirs, and was clasping my 4-year-old daughter's hand when a young man extended his arm and fired off multiple shots along the busy street running parallel to the boardwalk. Snatching my daughter up into my arms, I joined the throng of screaming revelers running away from the gunfire and toward the water.
The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
"Someone was just shooting on the beach," she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.
Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn't have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.
"No," she said. "I am talking to the police."
My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/05/black-america-police_n_6808506.html
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rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)police using racist actions against the Black Community, I have a thought. We are looking at a civil war. The white police are killing, intimidating, and imprisoning the Black Community. If the Black Community rebels, the rest of the middle and lower classes will have to choose sides. While we are fighting among ourselves, we are not rebelling against the Oligarchs. It's worth billions to the Oligarchs to keep us fighting among ourselves. The Oligarchs don't care if the nitwits have guns because they know the nitwits will use them against the Black Community and not the Oligarchs.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)that what you say is 110% true. For the 1% it is ALL about dividing
the 99%, any which way they can.
As Jay Gould (1900 RR tycoon) said, when fighting the unionization of his workers, "I can hire 1/2 the working class to kill the other 1/2".
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)enemy. The white community has allowed the police to imprison and kill at will members of the Black Community. We of the White Community condone the actions of the militarized police if in no other way, by ambivalence. Of course this plays into the hands of the Powers That Be. We must unite against the real enemy, the Oligarchs.
KeepItReal
(7,769 posts)I was on the phone with 911 as the police car drove up and started to meet the officers responding.
"Stay right there!! Don't you move!" the cop yelled at me as he got out of his cruiser. I tried to explain that I was the person who called 911 and I still had them on the phone at the moment. He did not care.
He proceeded in asking me questions about *NOTHING* that had to do with my stolen car - looking for some perceived activity he could arrest me for.
All I wanted to do was get the Police to let me know if somehow I had parked my car illegally and it was towed, or if it was indeed stolen.
The cop refused to answer this simple question and antagonized me the whole time. I spent the whole time in righteous indignation at this cops attitude while not trying to give him a reason to arrest me at the same time.
The cop's partner, to his credit, stayed out of the whole interaction. I feel like he knew what I was up against and wasn't that type of person.
In the meantime, my companion who was from Memphis, called someone to assist us.
To this day, I do not know who this African-American woman was, but the cops immediately changed their attitude upon her arrival. They treated her with the utmost respect and deference.
The cop interrogating me ceased that and then proceeded to take down my information to create a police report and informed me that, yes, my rental car had been stolen.
The whole time I'm standing there in my business suit after having dinner at a nice Italian restaurant and hanging out with my lady friend in downtown Memphis.
That was the first time I had ever called the police in my life.
