Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It's about enforcing white supremacy
By Paul Butler, The Guardian
On Friday the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television as he covered protests of police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jimenez identifies as African American and Hispanic, and when the cops confronted him, he did just what minority parents tell their kids to do. Jimenez cooperated; he was respectful, deferential even. He said: “We can move back to where you like … We are getting out of your way … Wherever you want us, we will go.”
It didn’t matter; the police officers put handcuffs on him and led him away, and then came back to arrest his crew. Jimenez narrated his arrest as they led him away. His voice is steady. His eyes, though. Jimenez is masked so his eyes are the only clue to what he’s feeling. His eyes are perplexed and terrified. I get it. When a black or brown person goes into police custody, you never know what is going to happen. You just know that when you leave police custody, if you are lucky enough to leave, you will be diminished. That is the point.
What’s most interesting is not that Jimenez and his colleagues were released shortly thereafter without any charges filed (or even being told why they had been taken into custody). That’s what class will buy a black man in America. You don’t get it quite as bad as your lower-income brethren. Jeff Zucker, the CNN president, talked to Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and the crew was quickly released. With an apology from the governor, not the cops. Cops rarely apologize, especially to black men.
But what’s most interesting is what happened to Josh Campbell, a white CNN journalist who was in the same area as Jimenez and not arrested. Campbell said his experience was the “opposite” of Jimenez’s. The cops asked him “politely to move here and there”. “A couple times I’ve moved closer than they would, like, they asked politely to move back. They didn’t pull out the handcuffs.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/30/policing-in-the-us-is-not-about-enforcing-law-its-about-enforcing-white-supremacy
But, come on, it's just a few Bad Apples in our police forces!
Yeah.
Right.
And, speaking of Apples, anybody in the market the for a bridge in the Big one?
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delisen
(6,043 posts)
Buckeye_Democrat
(14,853 posts)It seems more economic in my experience, and a consequence of that would probably be racist too.
The cops in my area, a neighborhood which is about 90% white, are always patrolling the poorer areas like where I live. When I drive around the wealthier enclaves, I don't see cops just parked along the streets like they do where I live.
And maybe there's indeed more crime where I live, but I don't see it! My guess is that we'd have more people selling drugs or whatever to survive, and the cops that are often "hunkered down" here are hoping to file additional charges whenever they stop someone for a broken headlight or whatever.
And here's something that happened to me here, many years ago:
I had returned home from my 2nd shift job and then went outside to smoke a cigarette. I was sitting just outside my apartment door, smoking quietly a little after midnight when most of my neighbors were apparently asleep.
A police car pulled into an adjacent apartment parking lot and I quietly watched him. Then he stopped and yelled, "Hey! What are you doing!!" I assumed that he was yelling toward someone else that I couldn't see. Then he repeated it a couple more times until I stood up and said, "Me?"
"Yeah, you! Come over here!" So I started walking toward him and he yelled for me to put out the cigarette. So I did.
As I got near him and his car, he asked if I knew about a windshield that was busted out of a car about a mile away?
Me: "No, I just come home from work not long ago."
Him: "Oh, yeah? 'Cause you seem to match the description of the perpetrator. Got ID on you?"
Me: "Yes, but it's still in my car over there near my apartment."
Him: "Show me. Let's go!"
So he walked behind me toward my car, and I unlocked it. I then forewarned him it was in the glove box, so I'd have to open it. He put his hand on his gun. (Aww, jeezuz.)
I pulled out my driver's license and showed it to him, and then he talked on his radio like he wanted someone to check my background.
Within a couple minutes, he returned my ID (which I shoved into a pocket) and told me that I shouldn't be outside at night because some teenagers were causing trouble. (I was middle-aged. Did he mistake me as a teenager when I supposedly matched a description?)
Then he asked this dumb question: "Is this where you live?!"
Me: "Yes, this is the address from my driver's license. That's my car, and I was sitting just outside my door earlier in this chair." I opened the door and said, "See?"
He told me to go inside and stay there, like we were dealing with a 9/11 terrorist situation in my area.
So I went inside and waited for him to leave. Then I returned to the outside chair and smoked another cigarette. There were far more apartment lights turned on after all of that loud ruckus from him.
Edit: I told coworkers about it the next day, and they said they would've just walked into the the apartment and locked the door in that situation. "Fuck that cop! Why did you even walk toward him?!"
