Ask virtually any Black person in the U.S., and he or she will tell you the police abuse Black people with impunity. Acts of police brutality are largely unreported for a variety of reasons, ranging from fear of reprisal and lack of faith in the System, to illiteracy and lack of awareness of legal options. Except within the Black community, the issue is rarely acknowledged or discussed. The notion that 9/11 was the first act of terrorism on U.S. soil is indicative of such tunnel vision. Centuries of lynchings, executions, rapes, and pseudo-scientific experimentation on Black people are somehow excluded from the rubric of terrorist acts on American soil.
I've discussed the issue of police brutality with a broad spectrum of Blacks and Whites. The difference in reaction is stark, and strictly divided along racial lines.
The reaction of Whites generally falls in one of four categories:
1. Don't you realize the predicament the poor cop is in? He doesn't know which suspect has a gun, and which one doesn't. If you were in that situation, you'd probably shoot first and ask questions later, too.
2. You deride them now, but I'll bet you'd call them in an instant if someone breaks into your house.
3. Oh, they pulled him over, searched his car, and held him for three hours? It happened to me, too.
4. He's in jail/dead/etc.? He must have done it.
Unfortunately, these reactions do not reflect the reality on the ground. The reaction of Black people is formulated through first hand experience. Nothing brings home reality quicker than being at the end of a police baton or stun gun. And judging from the number of Black men spreadeagled outside Jaguars and Lexuses in police stops, class offers little protection.
I'm not evidently Black, and am generally exempt from police harassment. As a Muslim, however, I feel strongly that I must speak out on this issue for three reasons:
1. Everyone living in the U.S. has profited from forced Black labor. We owe a debt to Black people. At the very least, we must oppose police brutality against the very people without whom this country's very infrastructure would not exist.
2. To remain silent against the racist power structure is to acquiesce--indeed profit from--that power structure.
3. The Qur'an commands opposition to injustice. And racism (with all its economic implications) is the leading form of injustice in the U.S.
Only the most blatant acts of police terror--such as those involving Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, or Sean Bell--garner corporate media attention, and that too, usually after massive public outcry. But terrorism of the U.S. Black population occurs daily, and at many levels. Some are immediately life-threatening, such as the dragging of James Byrd, Jr., behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, or the deliberate ramming of Black suspects with police cruisers in South Carolina. Others are not immediately life-threatening, but rather confer long-range mental and physical health problems on the victims.
Take for example, the case of a close friend, who is Black. He was accosted by MTA police on the Baltimore light rail enroute to work. The events as he related them:
Between commuting by public transportation and time spent at work, he is away from home at least 14 hours a day. Since he is very strapped for time, he occasionally pays bills via cell phone during his long commute. Recently, he boarded the train, sat down, and was paying a utility bill, when three hulking MTA cops approached him. My friend is 5'4," slender and slight, with a very quiet manner. He does not engage in illegal or threatening behaviors in public. The approach by three cops seemed grossly misplaced.
They demanded to see my friend's boarding pass (checking of boarding passes is standard procedure on light rail, but generally conducted by a regular MTA employee). He took a few seconds too long to hang up the cell and produce it, so they verbally assaulted him.
He challenged their rudeness. They removed him from the train without warning. Then, they wrote him a citation for "disorderly conduct". Since he was forced to miss his train and had to wait for a later one, he was late for work--a very serious matter, since he is the only breadwinner for his family, and could be suspended or fired for tardiness. And he was saddled with the added burden of going to court to contest the bogus citation.
My friend said what he'd experienced was not at all unusual. Poor and working class Black people riding Baltimore's light rail are routinely accosted by cops. He'd witnessed an incident involving an elderly Black woman with dreadlocks. Probably hungry after a hard day's work and facing a long commute on the slow moving train, she committed the mortal sin of eating a piece of bread on the light rail (eating on the train is technically prohibited by MTA rules). "MTA police jacked her up," said my friend. "They put her in a choke hold, and took her off the train."
He relayed another such incident involving a young Black woman with her child. She was quietly sitting on the train, talking to her mate on her cell, when she was accosted by two MTA cops. It was not clear what "crime" she'd committed. MTA police demanded her ID, frisked and verbally assaulted her--all in front of her child. Then, the cops forcefully removed her and the child from the train. When her mate arrived at the scene, the cops threatened to arrest him, too.
By contrast, the Whites who board the same light rail in Hunt Valley, Falls Road, or other affluent Baltimore suburbs enroute to their plush offices in downtown Baltimore, or to BWI Airport encounter no such police harassment. White and Asian tourists traveling by light rail for an afternoon of frolicking around Baltimore's sordidly gentrified Inner Harbor are untouched by racist cops. The rich, white drunks overflowing light rail trains leaving Camden Yards (stadium site) following a baseball game (whose tickets are so expensive as to be unaffordable to most of Baltimore's Black majority) are not harassed. Frequently, their fares are not even checked, nor is their public drunkenness.
Indeed police harassment appears reserved for Baltimore's poor Blacks, who often spend hours trying to get to work on the city's highly inefficient mass transit, to earn slave wages which they dutifully turn over to bloodsucking slumlords. All of this occurs in a majority Black city. I watch both sides of it from where I sit at work, and it makes me sick to the stomach. A People's Tribunal--to record and eventually try everyday acts of police terror against the U.S. Black population--is needed.
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