Heres some cold hard facts. And you think its not race driven? Just cuz it doesnt affect u directly doesnt mean it doesnt exist Darrell Jetter and Mike Stuver. In 2005, the Bartholomew family was walking back from a grocery store after Hurricane Katrina when New Orleans police opened fire with assault rifles and a shotgun. The police killed a 17-year-old family friend named James Brissette and wounded four others. A developmentally disabled man named Ronald Madison ran when the shooting started. Police chased him down in a car. An officer fired a shotgun from the vehicles backseat, killing Madison. All of the victims were unarmed and black. The next year, a young black man named Sean Bell was celebrating with friends at a bar the night before his wedding. As he drove home, five New York Police Department officers unloaded 55 shots at them. Bell was killed and two friends injured. They were unarmed. In 2009, another young black man, this one named Oscar Grant, was lying face down in an Oakland train station when a BART police officer shot him in the back, killing him. In 2011 in White Plains, New York, former Marine Kenneth Chamberlain accidentally triggered his Life Aid medical alert necklace, causing police to be sent to his door. He said he was fine and didnt need help. Police called him the N-word, broke down his door, tasered him and shot him to death. Anyone who follows such news could give many more examples: Malice Green, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima (who was not shot but raped with a broom handle by police), Prince Jones, Henry Glover, Ramarley Graham, Shem Walker, Kendrec McDade… So lets look at the past few weeks at incidents involving unarmed black men: • Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York police officer concerned that Garner was selling untaxed, loose cigarettes. • John Crawford was standing on the toy aisle of an Ohio Wal-Mart holding an air rifle hed picked up off a shelf when police arrived and shot him dead. • Ezell Ford was shot by an LA police officer and killed. • Dante Parker, who was riding a bicycle in Southern California, was tasered to death by police who tried to arrest him after hearing about a robbery suspect on a bike. • Michael Brown was shot by police in broad daylight on a Ferguson, Missouri public street. The protests surrounding this case are what prompted Fredericks tweet. How common are such occurrences? A Bureau of Justice Statistics report in 2008 found that black people were almost three times more likely than white people to be subjected to force or threatened with it by police. Multiple studies have found white and black people use marijuana at similar rates. Given there are 6.5 times as many white people in America, equality of policing would lead one to expect white people to be arrested 6.5 times as much. Not true. As a 2013 New York Times story put it: Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data. An even bigger disparity is seen in Browns hometown. The International Business Times reported that, based on Missouri government figures, black residents of Ferguson are arrested at four times the rate of white residents. USA Today examined justifiable homicide reports sent to the FBI. It found that over the seven years ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person on average twice a week. That number is based on data from only four percent of law enforcement agencies.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 13:25:04 +0000
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