Police Given an Open Season Pass to Kill Innocent Blacks

This is going to anger you. This is going to get you riled up. This may even prompt you to action. When did it become okay to murder our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and what makes them think they can get away with it? Here is a sample of some recent cases, most are well known, and links are provided if you wish to dig deeper. They are presented chronologically;

In June of 2006, in Atlanta, GA, 92 year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot dead in the apartment she occupied for 17 years. Police using an illegally obtained no-knock warrant burst through her door dressed in fatigues. As they were breaking in, she fired a single warning shot into the air, to no avail. After they entered, shot her, left her without care to bleed to death on the floor, they began to plant marijuana in her basement to 'justify' the shooting. see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Johnston

The three officers involved were later convicted of a slew of charges, the worst mansklaughter, and including falsifying the initial warrant request, lying to investigators, and civil rights violations. The maximum sentence any of the three will serve is 10 years...less time off for good behavior.

On New Years Day, 2009 Bay Area Rapid Transit police had stoppped a train due to a fight on the platform. As they tried to sort out the incident, they detained some of the people who appeared to be invloved, for questioning. Among those detained was
Oscar Grant a 22 year-old, father of a 4 year-old daughter, who worked as a butcher. While most of this was happening, many people on the train were using cell phones to document what they felt may have been ill treatment of the detainees. These same phones recorded the fatal shot from Officer Johannes Mershle's gun.

Johannes Mershle has been charged with murder, an extremely rare charge for any law enforcement officer for a line of duty killing. A charge prompted not by the outrage or even the overwhelming evidence. The charge largely stems from the fact that the officer to date still refuses to explain why he shot Oscar Grant.


Most recently, on February 20th, while enjoying the presence of his children and grand children, 73 year old, retired electric utility worker, Bernard Munroe, was killed in the doorway of his home. See - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-race-shootings-webmar13,0,7686526.story Though there are conflicting reports, the police presence that day was a routine patrol, and for apparently no good reason, moments after engaging some of the people on the street, Mr. Munroe was shot and denied medical attention until he died. The one consstency of the story is that it is well known that Mr. Munroe maintained a firearm on his porch at all times. Witnesses state they saw the police remove the firearm from its usual place and put it next to the body of Mr. Munroe. See - http://www.ktbs.com/news/Investigators-re-enact-Homer-police-shooting-as-part-of-investigation-27496/

As if the entire incident were not tragic enough, the police Chief, Russell Mills, highlights the racial insensitivity and profiling that mirrors the actions of his officers. It is statements like these that support the level of tension and mistrust between the opolice and the citizens of Homer. During an interview, he made the following chilling statement on the heals of the words, "Thats how it should be" as he responded to the complaints by the NAACP about the harrassing stops and searches; "If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people—we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."

I read an interesting part of this story that jumped out at me and prompted this rage against these injustices. Rather than paraphrase, I have taken an excerpt directly from the article. The horror is not that such a thing can exist, the horro is if you really think about it; there is NO WAY to correct it. That can only mean, more of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, dead for no good reason.

"All the anecdotal information demonstrates that African Americans are the most frequent victims of zealous, inappropriate police activity that often winds up in a shooting," said Reggie Shuford, a senior attorney with the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's a shoot first, ask questions later approach to policing."

The evidence is not merely anecdotal. The most recent national analysis from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that blacks and Hispanics were nearly three times as likely as whites to be searched by police—and blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be subjected to the use of force.

Psychologists are stepping up research into the implicit, unconscious racial biases that may be driving such statistics and affecting police behavior.

"If in fact police have implicit biases—if they automatically associate blacks with crime—then that would be relevant to an officer in a split-second, shoot-or-don't-shoot situation," said Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who is creating a new anti-bias police training program with funding from the Justice Department. "Is the officer more inclined to believe he sees a gun in the hand of a black person, rather than a cell phone? I think that is possible."