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A Utah cop pulled a gun on a ten-year-old Black child playing on his grandmother's front lawn, after receiving a report that a suspect was "Black, Hispanic or Polynesian." In a state that's 1% Black, the police chief defended his officer's "good judgment." apnews.com/edf5a1ff3c144c…
After pointing the gun at the child, the cop told him to put his hands in the air and get on the ground and not to ask questions. After being confronted by the child's mother, he got in his car and left.
This is what people need to understand when they defend a random arrest they read about by saying, oh well, the police said, they matched the description of a suspect. Here the description was anyone "Black, Hispanic or Polynesian" so that included a 10-year-old Black child.
You might think this is extreme, but I promise you, as a public defender in New York City, the descriptions are things like, "young Black male in blue jeans" or "light-skin male wearing baseball hat." They are that vague.
If you're a White person, imagine a description, "White person in gray sweatshirt." It doesn't include how you wear your hair, if you have facial hair, the shape of your face, your facial features, nothing that makes you distinguishable from any White person walking the planet.
And as I said yesterday, when talking about the Hawthorne police department justifying their arrest of William by claiming he matched the description of a suspect, this is absolutely the number one pretext police use to stop and search Black and Brown people.
When you read in a newspaper that someone is a suspect in a crime because they matched the description, don't just accept it, ask what that description was.
It's not even a question of police inherently seeing Black and Brown people as suspicious (though I am sure that is true) but it is an intentional classification of Black and Brown people as suspects.
