And she panics, and of course she does.
The last few days, the local news here in the Grand Rapids area has been all about that handcuffing incident. (Well, that and the toxic water a few miles north.) There’s two groups yelling past one another. You’ve got the local black community understandably outraged, and then there’s the police boosters saying that it was no big deal and this is an overreaction.
The tone-deaf actions on the police side are incredible to me. Yes, the girl overreacted. She’s a pre-teen black girl in a world where she hears about cops shooting and beating black people, of course she overreacted! The police chief actually did apologize right away, but now he’s getting flak from his people that he “didn’t have their back.”
It doesn’t help that the GR police department was found earlier this year to be twice as likely to stop black drivers as white drivers. (There was some concern over the methodology of that report, but it’s generally acknowledged as accurate enough.) And then there was the time that five black boys were detained at gunpoint during a search for an armed suspect. And those are just the incidents that actually make the news.
Sure looks like a pattern to me. Insensitive ineptitude at best, pure racism at worst. It’s embarrassing to admit that I live in an area with this kind of awful police activity.
Yeah, anytime a black person isn’t freaked out by police in an interaction I consider them to be Zen masters these days.
Anytime a black person survives an interaction with the police, I consider them to be lucky as hell.
Any time someone expects an 11 year old girl to act like a fifty year old white man, I question that person’s ability to think.
Ya, but then sometimes they get shot anyway, like the guy who was actually a caregiver for an autistic guy, and laid down with his hands over his head, calmly explaining what was going on… And they shot him anyway.
God, stop shooting unarmed people, Christ.
Merry Christmas, dead little 6yo boy!
The cops were all shaken up by it apparently and needed hugs, per the story. I hope this doesn’t ruin their holidays with their families.
More cowards who nothing will happen to. Shooting an unarmed suspect and doing it while she was standing in front of someone’s front door. They really should teach cops how guns work and how to use their mouths/brains.
I think they are all too familiar with this part, and not enough with brains working.
Obviously not as they should have known that was not a safe background for a fusillade of bullets. Every first time shooter is taught that, these guys must have all been new at the shooty things.
What they teach you is “don’t point a gun at something unless you want to kill it.” They understand the pointing part just fine, it’s the “want to kill it” part they need to work on.
Nah, I bet some of these veteran officers are on their, what… second or third innocent gunned down?
I assume that none of them were wearing functioning body cameras so we’ll probably just get the bullshit police version of this story and nothing else.
My heart aches for these poor deputies. With the Lord’s help, hopefully they’ll be able to murder innocent kids again before too long.
“Though deputies weren’t injured, the sheriff said they were “pretty shaken up” after the shooting and he hugged each of them.”
Those body cameras just seem to stop working or fall off at the most inconvenient of times, don’t they?
Are you goddamn motherfucking kidding me?
Kids. If this were my kid, I’d probably be a statistic afterwards. As would the officer.
Notably, though, that meant that one judge felt that police should, indeed, have the right to do force children to masturbate in front of them in order to incriminate themselves.
Following his ordeal, Sims filed a civil rights lawsuit against Abbott, arguing that his “search” violated his right of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Incredibly, the district court dismissed Sims’ complaint, finding that the detective was entitled to “qualified immunity” for his actions. In other words, even assuming that ordering a teenager to masturbate in front of the police was unlawful, the law was not “clearly established” enough for Abbott to know for sure that it was unlawful.
Yeah, everything is fine, the system is working well.
Fuck the police