re: This is why Black Americans dont trust the police

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A lot of the police shooting victims are just being stopped for traffic violations or some other petty, non-violent, offense.

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The problem with this type of logic is that we assume that an entire group of people is responsible for the actions of some and that the entire group should be criminalized for it.

So in other words, because of the perception that Blacks commit more crimes this somehow justifies the fact that Black people are actually policed more. The problem is that this shouldn’t be the case. First, an overwhelming percentage of Blacks are not criminals and those that have been convicted of crimes, studies show that roughly 75% of Blacks in prison are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. The other narrative is that Black neighborhoods are ubiquitously framed as being problematic and crime prone when in fact there are a plethora of predominantly Black neighborhoods around the country, one of which I happen to live in, that has extremely low crime rates and are not part of the narrative. On the other end of the spectrum, there are predominantly White neighborhoods that have high crime rates, but for some reason we leave these two types of neighborhoods out of the narrative as it relates to crime.

So what is happening is that an entire group of people who overwhelmingly are not committing crime and are not guilty, end up being criminalized because of the logic that people have about this.

I will give a couple of quick examples here. First is the logic that if a person is stopped for a crime or suspected of committing a crime they are probably guilty. Actually this is not the case, there was a study done in New York City using Stop-and-Frisk data. This study actually resulted in Stop-and-Frisk being ruled unconstitutional by the New York Supreme Court, and what they found was that African Americans were more likely to be stopped by the police, they were also more likely to be roughed up by the police, to be frisked, physically assaulted by the police, but they were significantly less likely to have contraband on their person or actually be committing a crime at that particular time. So you had about 9 out of 10 of the Black men that were being stopped were not doing anything wrong. What is interesting to me, knowing the way that police operate personally and then also looking at the data, is that there are a lot of these points in time when the police interact with citizens that is never captured in the data.

Another point I would like to make here is that Philando Castile who was recently killed in St. Paul, Minnesota was stopped 50 times over the past fourteen years or so. The logic is that if you are stopped that much you obviously have to be committing some sort of crime. This is what is interesting about Philando Castile. He had never been convicted of violent crime, he was a legal gun owner, and according to the other employees and the children of the school where he worked he was a model employee, and he took classes learning how to deal with the police. This speaks to the fact that as much as we value politics of respectability in the Black community, they do not necessarily prevent people from being harmed by the police. So in many respects this is about Blackness being seen as guilty before due processes. The logic is that if the cops didn’t catch a Black person doing something today, they probably will one day, so who cares if this is happening today. The logic is that in being killed, if you are a Black person, is simply collateral damage. This is highly problematic.

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