Friday, April 20, 2018
Thursday, April 19, 2018
This is Not an Isolated Incident
An excerpt from the Washington Post -
Calling the police on black people isn’t a Starbucks problem. It’s an America problem.
By Karen Attiah
It’s good that Starbucks, with its announcement this week that it will close thousands of stores for a day of “racial bias training” in May, is taking steps in the right direction after a video of two black men getting arrested in one of its coffee shops went viral. But white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem.
The tragic examples are all over the Internet. In McKinney, Tex., in 2015, after a neighbor called police about a pool party, a responding officer used brute force on 15-year-old Dajerria Becton, slamming the girl to the ground by her hair and jamming his knees into her back and neck. The video of the sobbing, 100-pound, swimsuit-clad girl went viral. The officer was fired.
That same year, South Carolina officer Ben Fields was fired over a viral video of him flipping a black high school girl over her desk and dragging her across the classroom. Her offense? Refusing to put away her cellphone.
And, of course, who can forget what happened in 2009 when a woman in Cambridge, Mass., called 911 to report a possible burglary in her neighborhood? The man she called the cops on was renowned black Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. He was arrested and charged — for trying to get into his own house.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/calling-the-police-on-black-people-isnt-a-starbucks-problem-its-an-america-problem/2018/04/18/e871d504-4330-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html?utm_term=.cf7377430434
Calling the police on black people isn’t a Starbucks problem. It’s an America problem.
By Karen Attiah
It’s good that Starbucks, with its announcement this week that it will close thousands of stores for a day of “racial bias training” in May, is taking steps in the right direction after a video of two black men getting arrested in one of its coffee shops went viral. But white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem.
The tragic examples are all over the Internet. In McKinney, Tex., in 2015, after a neighbor called police about a pool party, a responding officer used brute force on 15-year-old Dajerria Becton, slamming the girl to the ground by her hair and jamming his knees into her back and neck. The video of the sobbing, 100-pound, swimsuit-clad girl went viral. The officer was fired.
That same year, South Carolina officer Ben Fields was fired over a viral video of him flipping a black high school girl over her desk and dragging her across the classroom. Her offense? Refusing to put away her cellphone.
And, of course, who can forget what happened in 2009 when a woman in Cambridge, Mass., called 911 to report a possible burglary in her neighborhood? The man she called the cops on was renowned black Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. He was arrested and charged — for trying to get into his own house.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/calling-the-police-on-black-people-isnt-a-starbucks-problem-its-an-america-problem/2018/04/18/e871d504-4330-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html?utm_term=.cf7377430434
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