Post by bistro on Dec 30, 2014 17:54:58 GMT -5
Is Obedience the Only Way to Avoid Police Brutality?
By Charles Davis Sep 15 2014 www.vice.com/read/is-obedience-the-only-way-to-avoid-police-brutality-915
“Maybe you shouldn’t just be obedient,” Reginald Jones-Sawyer, Sr. told the crowd. Instead of just teaching children to be meek and compliant with law enforcement, “maybe we should starting teaching our young sons to ask for IDs—ask them to remember names and badge numbers" when they're stopped by police. Maybe we should all be more vigilant, he said.
“When you see our young people stopped, you stop and start recording what you see," he said. Let members of law enforcement know that their every move will be scrutinized. "Obviously," though, "with the flash off"—the police don't need another excuse to shoot.
I didn’t expect Jones-Sawyer, a Democratic member of the California State Assembly, to sound like such a firebrand when I first showed up to the hearing on police violence organized by the California and Hawaii chapters of the NAACP. He’s a politician and his job is to legislate, to diffuse community anger over out-of-control police by channeling it into non-binding resolutions and stern floor speeches. But speaking to me in the lobby of the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, he said that what he really wants to do is “start is a grassroots effort to combat [police brutality].”
Perhaps he wanted to reduce the expectation that one can solve the persistent problem of police violence against communities of color through the electoral system. To me, though, it sounded as if he was genuinely disturbed by the recent spate of police killings of unarmed black men, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Ezell Ford and Omar Abrego in LA. It’s time, he said, for communities of color to go on the offensive.
more at the link above
By Charles Davis Sep 15 2014 www.vice.com/read/is-obedience-the-only-way-to-avoid-police-brutality-915
“Maybe you shouldn’t just be obedient,” Reginald Jones-Sawyer, Sr. told the crowd. Instead of just teaching children to be meek and compliant with law enforcement, “maybe we should starting teaching our young sons to ask for IDs—ask them to remember names and badge numbers" when they're stopped by police. Maybe we should all be more vigilant, he said.
“When you see our young people stopped, you stop and start recording what you see," he said. Let members of law enforcement know that their every move will be scrutinized. "Obviously," though, "with the flash off"—the police don't need another excuse to shoot.
I didn’t expect Jones-Sawyer, a Democratic member of the California State Assembly, to sound like such a firebrand when I first showed up to the hearing on police violence organized by the California and Hawaii chapters of the NAACP. He’s a politician and his job is to legislate, to diffuse community anger over out-of-control police by channeling it into non-binding resolutions and stern floor speeches. But speaking to me in the lobby of the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, he said that what he really wants to do is “start is a grassroots effort to combat [police brutality].”
Perhaps he wanted to reduce the expectation that one can solve the persistent problem of police violence against communities of color through the electoral system. To me, though, it sounded as if he was genuinely disturbed by the recent spate of police killings of unarmed black men, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Ezell Ford and Omar Abrego in LA. It’s time, he said, for communities of color to go on the offensive.
more at the link above