Personally, I am not a huge fan of the police. I have never been arrested but I have been pulled over or stopped when walking home from my friends house one day. A coach from my highschool had called because someone was attempting to break in to a Tire Man down the street from my house. My friend was walking me home and we saw 3 police cars on the main road. We continued to walk and one pulled up alongside of us and made us stop. We were standing in my front yard and they would not let me get my mom or do anything for that matter. They did not tell us why they were pulling us over or anything at all. To me, the officers were a bit friendly to my friend they were not. He is 6'4 and black and they treated him way different then they treated me. When putting us into the police car he was having a hard time because he is so tall and the seats are so far back but they kept shoving him and pushing him into the car. He tried explaining but the two officers kept telling him to shut up and get in the car. When another car showed up I was put into that one. As they took him out of the car they continuously kept threatening to tazer him although he was doing exactly as they said. The next night his brother was hanging out with some minors and it was past curfew although he was the only one who was 18 years old, the cops let everyone else go and kept him for an hour or so. Once again he did nothing wrong but he was the only black kid out of six. In both incidents, the cops showed major racism and I think this is wrong. However, that is exactly what happened back then. The Jews got stereotyped and even if they no longer practiced the Jewish faith, they were still considered a part of the Jewish race and treated poorly. So although police aren’t as bad as the Germans were back then, if nothing is done about the cruel and unjust treatment of the police, it could lead up to the point where an officer may seriously injure or even kill a person and it will be ok because it was self defense or some other BS excuse for their actions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Unfortunately, your statement near the end is not just some possible distopian future, it often occurs. Most of you probably remember the story of Sean Bell, the unarmed 23 year old who was shot on the day of his wedding just last year.
Bell and the two men he was with were all unarmed and they were not up to anything illegal. But as they were leaving a New York club on November 25, 2006, the police shot 50 rounds at their car. That's right, 50. Why would anyone shoot 50 rounds at 3 unarmed men? Well, all three men were black so I guess that is a good starting point. Sadly, racially motivated killings like this one are not hard to find. Except the media usually doesn't like to talk about them. The only reason the Bell story got so much attention was because it happened in NYC and it was on the day of his wedding, so it was just too much for journalists to look past.
However, there is some good news. If you trust the NYPD's statistics then in 1973 there were 1.82 fatal police shootings per 1000 officers; in 2005 there were 0.25 such shootings per 1000 officers. But New York has a per-capita rate of shooting much lower than almost any other big city in America, so there is still a lot of progress to be made elsewhere.
As for comparing police brutality to the Holocaust, I think the comparison just doesn't hold up. Even a bad year in a big city will produce 10-15 fatal shootings, and some of these may even be explainable. The Nazis systematically killed 10 million people, so that is why I am still skeptical about this particular contemporary connection.
Post a Comment