Saturday, May 9, 2015

Christopher Ingraham: "These cops are tired of white people getting freaked out by their black neighbors"

Thought long and hard about posting this because you can easily see how people can get themselves unhinged and misunderstand the point. It's a very serious topic but on another level it's hilarious, like a Saturday Night Live skit. It also makes me wonder how much time and energy is wasted by PBSO and other local municipal police departments 'investigating' blacks and African Americans going about their daily lives and doing nothing wrong? Some areas west of I-95 in the City of Lake Worth come to mind. 

Without further ado, here is an excerpt from Wonkblog, an article written by Christopher Ingraham:
     "People, please stop making my job so difficult."
     That's the opening of a discussion in the "ProtectAndServe," reddit's community of law enforcement officers. The poster, who goes by the handle "sf7" and has been verified as a law enforcement officer by the forum's moderators, goes on:
     So I'm working last week and get dispatched to a call of 'Suspicious Activity.' Ya'll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope.    It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in.     People. People. People. If you're going to be a racist, stereotypical jerk...keep it to yourself.
     Other forum users sympathize. One tells a story about someone asking the cops to investigate a middle-aged black man fishing in his own community [emphasis added]. Another was asked to respond to a report of two Middle Eastern guys sitting in the same car. Another laments that "we frequently get calls about black men and woman and kids, yes [expletive] kids, walking. Like WWB [walking while black] was actually a crime and not a Twitter joke."
     The stories pile on. A white security officer tells of the year he and his black wife lived in an apartment complex. "She got cops called a total of 9 times in the year we lived there I got zero," he says. A retired cop recalls the time a "lady called scared to death because some black guy was sitting in his truck across from her house" -- it was the water meter reader.
And you can see how it doesn't help matters when a blogger in the City of Lake Worth puts stuff like this on her blog:
So charming, isn't it?