Thread by @BushidoEvans

Can I tell everyone a story? It involves a School Resource Officer and my first significant experience with the police in general.

When I was a sophomore in High School, I moved from a city in NJ to a suburb in NJ at the time the town I came from was know as a rough place...

There are cities that were far more dangerous in the country, but to the people in this suburb it seemed like some war torn country. I was a normal kid at the time, maybe a little big for my age, but nothing else stood out. Well...you know what stood out...

About a week into me attending this new High School I was approached by the "School Resource Officer" who is a full blown cop employed to monitor the school, I still can't understand why this tiny high school in this tiny suburban town needed a cop in the school, but 🤷🏾‍♂️

He approached me in a very friendly way and introduced himself, I introduced myself and he calmly asks if I'd be interested in coming to his office and speaking with him at some point. I said, "cool" thinking he just wanted to get to know the new student in his school...

A few days later he comes and pulls me out of a class and takes me to his office, it's this tiny little room in the back of the school library (I'm getting chills telling this story, smh) and he opens the door and in his desk is all the snacks you could imagine and candy you...

wouldn't believe how much candy, snacks and juice he had all over his desk, chips, donuts, you name it he had it. He asks me to sit and tells me I can have whatever I want, so I'm like "bet!" I start eating snacks and he starts asking me about the town I'm from and about my...

Family life, making small talk and all of a sudden he moves the candy out of the way and places this binder on the desk. He opens it and there are a bunch of pictures of kids...black and hispanic kids in bandanas and throwing up hand signs and shyt like that and suddenly I knew..

What was going on, he began asking if I knew what these things were and if I'd participated in any of this kind of behavior where I was from. Specifically if I knew anything about the bloods and I noticed their weren't many picture of people in red or red bandanas in his book...

I told him I didn't know anything about the signs or secondary colors "I know crips wear blue and bloods wear red" because that's all I knew...he kept drilling me about the topics I kept saying I didn't know and he was visibly getting frustrated. After a bit more questioning...

He had me stand up and he took a Polaroid picture of me and put it in his book. For the next 3 years EVERY SINGLE DAY after school a cop car would appear on my walk home, the town was becoming more "diverse" and they would literally follow us for a stretch of our walk home...

Every single day, I'd never been in any serious trouble in my entire life up until this point. Suddenly I would find myself at odds with these police officers almost daily hurling insults at them from anger in which they would hop out and harass...rinse/repeat...

Y'all get the rest of the story.

Anyway I said all that to say this, it doesn't matter if a black kid is a good kid...or even an indifferent kid, they will criminalize you the way that cop criminalized me, for nothing more than being black in a new school...they criminalize us

From birth blacks are given incendiary labels and are interacted with based on these labels. I never had a problem with and respected police officers just fine up until that point in my life, the point where I saw the way they see me and I've hated then for viewing me that way...

Since that point. They would slam me and my friends against their cars, the harrassment became normal and my hate grew. They created that hate. If you ever wondered why we say we hate them. Use this as one out of a million examples

#PoliceBrutality
#AmericanTerrorists