Thread by @DempseyTwo

I watch a lot of the first 48. It is a show about the first 48 hours after a murder. The detectives say their chances of solving a murder are severely diminished if they can’t do it within the first 48 hours. A wee thread on Black Friday.👇🏻

The first 48 takes the viewer from the 911 call through arrest when able, and sometimes they tell you the judgment imposed by the courts. What I’ve found is this show is not entertaining, but rather an expose on the structures of and peek behind the curtain to structural racism.

These are not law and order detective stories. This isn’t a made for 9pm crime drama. This is real life people, being killed, by other real life people and leaving behind real life victims. The dead leave children, families, friends, holes.

The perpetrators leave children, families, friends, holes. Lives are destroyed. The show follows detectives to the same neighborhoods over and over again. They speak to the families of victims, sometimes on more than one occasion because they have lost more than one to violence.

As disturbing as it is to see victims lying in the street with police standing over them, trying to determine who they are, who did this to them and why, it is equally disturbing to watch the police arrive upon a suspect. The show brings you into the police squad room.

It reveals the detectives cynicism. Show after show, Black male suspect after Black male suspect. Black faces in mugshots, Black faces in interrogation rooms. The pride in the cops reactions when ‘they got one’.

The show takes the viewer into the car with the detectives on their way to crime scenes. If you watch closely enough, you will see how the landscape changes. How the neighborhoods change. How they begin where the flowers are and end up where weeds grow.

Where hope is absent. Where education is lower. Where jobs are less, where doctors offices are scarce but liquor stores are abundant. Bars on windows, almost as if a foreshadowing of lives always on the brink of being lived behind them.

You see how the infrastructure changes. How the opportunities disappear depending on the side of the city or town they are in. A show where the spectrum of opportunity to oppression is outlayed in a single car ride across town. The infrastructure of systemic racism revealed.

Leads are created and follow up interviews convene. Interviews with the victims friends. But they aren’t treated as friends. They are treated as suspects. They are interviewed in interrogation rooms. Cold interrogation rooms.

Interrogation rooms with No Smoking signs on the walls. No clocks. A room where time stands still. A room designed to make the occupant break. Where the police have been 1000 times before but the friend of a murder victim may be for the first time.

More Black faces in interrogation rooms. Isolated. For hours while the police check on information provided by a scared friend of a murder victim. A friend who is an active participant in trying to help the police solve the crime. Alone, a suspect. Scared.

When an actual suspect is revealed, the cameras show us one of the precursors to police brutality. The ‘hunt’. The language used reveals the systemic racism. On more than one photo lineup, I have seen the word ‘Target’ next to the suspects photo.

Target! This photo, with this Black face and the word ‘Target’ on it will be given to the ‘fugitive recovery team’ to ‘execute’ a warrant. Language matters. If this practice is repeated enough times, the police will see Black faces as targets. Systematically trained to do so.

And we wonder why Black men are being shot? That is not justice. Police want respect. I get that. Every policeman has the same opportunity for respect as they project out into the world. No different than anyone else. The badge does not command respect, the behavior does.

Interrogation rooms should not be kept at temperatures bordering on the torturous. If they are to include No Smoking signs, surely they can include a sign outlining Miranda rights. If a suspect is going to be in there for hours, they should at least learn their rights.

People should never be branded as ‘targets’. Police work should not be described as a ‘hunt’. It is this language and behavior revealed through this show that is showing us the systemic failures we need to address.

I am a white man. I have never shaken with fear when speaking to an officer. I have never been suspected of a crime. I have never been treated poorly by the police. I have never been pulled over within minutes upon my arrival in Arizona. My wife can say none of those things.

My in laws, my nephews my family has to worry about these things every time they leave their house. Racism is systemic whether it happens to you or not. Whether you recognize it or not. Whether you think it exists or not. It is shown to you everyday. You may be watching it now.

As white people, it is our duty to recognize these truths. To use our privilege to do something about it. The First 48 tells us time is of the essence. We have no time to waste. I’ve written my congressman outlining a need to remove ‘Bad Apples’ from police forces.

What can you do in the next 48 hours to work toward allyship and justice for all? What can you do to look deeper at the things you use to entertain yourself? This is our problem white people. We need to get to work. @WP4BL @BLMLA
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