These protests are giving me my first glimmer of hope in the last 3 1/2 years.
I saw a group of African American teens being harassed by the police back when I was a teen carhop- girls in their prom dresses being made to lie down in the oily parking lot while their tux clad beaus were being frisked It was a horrible thing, the excuse ?! One of the kids had a bottle of booze, that would NEVER happen to kids who look like my children.
I remember some shootings that didn't make the national news- the young man who was shot in the back from 12 feet away after being accused by someone anonymous over the intercom on our bay area rapid transit (the crime was stealing a boom box, the young man was late for work & refused to comply) The young man shot outside his grandma's door, he was painted as a burglary suspect but the tire iron he was meant to be carrying was never found. A person in the throes of a mental health crisis was pinned on their stomach, couldn't breathe & died -in the local news for a minute.The worst, the most egregious and the well documented, we only hear about those, that's the tip of the iceberg.
The police in my "liberal" town don't even have basic CPR & first aid training even tho they are first responders, they do carry guns & truncheons & drive hulking SUV s with rammers on the front.
Too many of them want absolute compliance to any order they give & are quick to escalate if a person doesn't comply. Their motto is "To serve and protect" What should that actually mean?
It isn't a few bad apples, it's a systemic problem, why did the one standing cop say nothing while his fellow officers slowly killed a man? Because that's the code, that's the culture. It is the mindset of an occupying force and it sucks up all the resources & is distrusted with good reason by a chunk of the community, the same chunk that is stifled & starved of resources & denied stuff some of us get to take for granted, like not worrying that some cop is going to lose his nut & take it out on our kid. These protests are not going to stop. My neighbor is being choked to death, I can't keep silent and look away.