“And BTW, a cop actually killing a black man is relatively rare. What’s not rare is non-lethal abuse and harassment by LEOs. This is a routine part of black mens’ lives, which is not OK.”
Right. Castile was pulled over, what, 54 times? I’m pretty sure that my white son is not on track to be pulled over 50+ times by the time he’s 32. Not even close. So if I’m a bit off about the or and the number of times pulled over, it’s kind of not the point. I’m in my late 40’s and at the rate I’m going I will not be pulled over even 20 times in my LIFE. And neither will my white husband.
@Pizzagirl I don’t think that avoiding permanent harm is a high priority in some PDs when dealing with this demographic. They have decades, apparently, of history with executing black men with impunity.
@1or2Musicians Exactly. I’ve been pulled over maybe 3 or 4 times in my 40+ years of driving. Each time I knew exactly what I’d done, and it was always in fact a traffic violation, not a code violation like a missing tail light. Ditto with my white husband. And I was never ever afraid of the cop. Afraid for my insurance rates, sure. But not in fear of my safety. That’s just not part of the white experience, and there are far too many whites who think that because it’s never happened to them, it’s never happened to anyone.
I’m neither black nor white. I think I’ve been pulled over maybe 6 times in life of 59 years, in my state an other places I’ve driven. Often I had some idea why I was stopped.
I’ve only been treated respectfully. I have never had an officer draw a gun on me, even the one time I was accused by the officer of driving a stolen car with my two toddlers in it. (He apologized when he realized he read the dispatcher inverted digits of my license plate.)
Being pulled over dozens of times and being afraid of law enforcement due to unpleasant encounters would definitely make me very wary of them and not likely to trust or turn to them. It would especially make me anxious for my kids (especially young males) if there appeared to be racial profiling.
You and your white husband probably drive cars that do not attract attention, and drive in a way that does not attract attention.
I’ve been stopped for headlight out, not using a turn signal (because the light was out), and rolling a stop sign. So maybe he got stopped more often than a white person would have, but my experience is that a white mom in a minivan gets stopped for these things. Never had illegal tinting or missing tags, but my white nephew was stopped for missing tags, which he had in the car and just had not installed. Not good enough, he got the ticket.
That’s not to say the officer was justified in shooting him, but if you are getting stopped as often as he was you might want to look at your behavior. Not every stop was racist.
Your quote doesn’t say anything about him having missing tags, only a missing license plate light. The cops must have really, really been stretching themselves to pull someone over for that!
His last stop was racist. He was supposedly pulled over for having a broken tail light but his tail lights were all operational. He was really pulled over because he “fit the profile” of an robber who had been in the area 2 days before. And he fit this profile by having “a wide set nose”. They were really stretching again.
@MomofJandL What did you mean by “You and your white husband probably drive cars that do not attract attention, and drive in a way that does not attract attention”
So apparently the officer involved in shooting behavior therapist Charles Kinsey, who was trying to help the autistic man with the truck, has said he was aiming at the autistic man and just accidentally hit Mr. Kinsey.
Ok, why is my link being blocked now? It’s an aol article, and the aol is ***'d out, as though I’d used a profanity that is filtered out. Are we not allowed to link to them?
It sounds like some cops are just terrified of black men; at least, this officer and the Philando Castile officer seemed to have very itchy trigger fingers. But remember Officer Wilson who shot Michael Brown? His testimony to the grand jury was that he somehow thought Michael Brown was superhuman and could run through bullets. This of course is a trope that goes back to Civil War times.
LasMa, I was puzzled when you said earlier that not “that many” black people were actually lynched. Nearly 4,000 black people murdered by mobs sounds like a lot to me (especially given the widespread terroristic impact of each lynching), regardless of what percentage of all black people that total may have represented. Especially when you think of some of the states in the Deep South that saw more than 500 lynchings of black people each. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States and http://www.chesnuttarchive.org/classroom/lynchingstat.html.
I think everyone should look through some of the lynching postcards and photographs collected at http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html, to try to gain a true understanding of what “lynching” involved.
Donna, even one is one too many, and I’m sorry that I gave the impression of minimizing what was in truth a bloodbath. That wasn’t my intention. My point is that we’re seeing a similar bloodbath now, administered by some police departments. I assume everyone here would say that lynching had to be stopped, and to be consistent, they should be just as adamant that cop-on-black violence has to be stopped. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing in some quarters is a reluctance to admit the magnitude of the crisis.
Lynching was often a public spectacle with a whole lot of white approval.
I am not going to compare any other type of behavior to lynching, but if someone Black makes that comparison I’m going to give it serious consideration. ( link in #210) Some lynchings were not publicized and were hushed up. They weren’t reported in newspapers and we may only have an oral tradition at this point. So I am thinking about that sort of lynching compared to recent police incidents. I am listening.
@partyof5, clearly what I meant was that not getting stopped might have had a lot to do with not having a car that attracted attention because of no seat belt, required lights out, overly tinted windows, and other things that local communities have decided to ask the police to issue tickets for, and not much to do with being white. White people I know that drive cars with code violations get stopped.
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo condemned both officers’ actions. He called the officer’s comments on the video “disturbing” and said a criminal investigation has been opened against the officer who arrested Breaion King.
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Since the Police Chief has condemned their actions, I don’t think there is any need to debate whether those officers were justified. We can’t know all that happened. However, according to their superiors, the actions were not justified.
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*Acevedo said he reviewed the video Wednesday with black community leaders for nearly 3 ½ hours. He said they included Fatima Mann, an activist with the Austin Justice Coalition, who told reporters outside the police station that she didn’t understand how no one in the department had previously raised concerns about the video.
“If that was a white woman, would he have yanked her out … and slammed her on the ground? Most of us could say absolutely not,” Mann said. “But for reason, for some strange reason, when people look like me, we’re more of a threat, and that means we get treated and thrown around as if we don’t matter.”*
I agree that I’ve been stopped when my safety sticker or auto registration is expired or tail light is broken or not working. even so, I am spoken to politely and not threatened and never have feared that I would be assaulted or arrested by law enforcement.
If I or my loved ones don’t have our wallet, we may be given a citation for driving without our license and/or auto insurance but never gave the car towed. The ticket is dismissed when we mail in proof that we had a valid license in force at the time the citation was issued. In the 4 years I sat as a traffic judge, no car was ever towed because the driver didn’t have his/her license when stopped, no matter what race the driver or officer was.
Towing is an extreme measure and costly–you have to pay the tow company cash and have to pay storage for how ER long they keep your car! It seems extreme to me for cars to be towed just because the driver doesn’t have a license on his/her person.
*Austin, Texas Police Chief Art Acevedo apologized to Breaion King during a news conference and pledged a series of administrative investigations and increased training. He said his “heart was sickened and saddened” by the arrest.
“I’m sorry that on the day that you were stopped for going 15 miles per hour,” Acevedo said in a public apology. “You were approached in a manner and treated in a manner that is not consistent with the expectations of this police chief, of most of the officers of this police department, and most importantly I think of all of us as human beings.” *
Many scholars will point out there is no way to really know the total number of lynchings, because so many were unreported.
I am convinced that there is no way to know how many have been assaulted or murdered without cause when stopped by police. We know it has happened. We have no way to know how often or how pervasive the problem has been. It keeps looking worse and worse.
It is impossible to have useful statistics for criminal behaviors which have been hushed up and covered up for decades or centuries.
@MomofJandL It wasnt clear what you meant which is why I asked before I responded.
Your statement, “You and your white husband probably drive cars that do not attract attention, and drive in a way that does not attract attention”, could also mean luxury cars. We actually are stopped more when we are in luxury cars, which some would say attract attention. So yes, sometimes depending where we are going , we will take one car over another because we know we with either increase or decrease our chances of being stopped.