Are cops across the U.S. trained to shoot innocent Black men but not whites who go on a shooting spree? Read the following excerpt from the January 5th New York Times and see if cops’ racist profiling kills Black males for no reason while refusing to arrest a white woman, wearing body armor, who flaunted a gun, shot at people multiple times and at a cop and led police in a chase through the streets.
There’s absolutely no doubt that racism is a killer, which the bosses use to win white workers to capitalist goals.
The day after Christmas, a shooter terrorized the streets of…Chattanooga, Tenn. According to the local newspaper, the shooter was “wearing body armor” and “firing multiple shots out her window at people and cars.” One witness told the paper that the shooter was “holding a gun out of the window as if it were a cigarette.”
“Officers found two people who said they were at a stop sign when a woman pulled up…and fired shots into their vehicle, hitting and disabling the radiator….More calls reported a woman pointing a firearm at people as she passed them in her car and…fired at another vehicle in the same area.”
When police officers came upon the shooter…[she] led them on a chase,….even point[ing] the gun at a police officer….
…Surely…officers would have been justified in using whatever force they saw fit. Right?
According to the paper, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.”
Who was this shooter anyway? Julia Shields, a 45-year-old white woman….
Would this episode have ended this way if the shooter had been…black….?
…The American mind has been poisoned from this country’s birth against…particularly African-American men….
It’s hard to read stories like this and not believe that there is a double standard in the use of force by the police…..
Michael Brown was unarmed….in Ferguson, Mo….
Eric Garner was unarmed on a Staten Island [N.Y.] street.
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old, walking around a Cleveland park and holding a toy gun….
John Crawford was in an Ohio Walmart, holding, but not shooting, an air rifle he had picked up from a store shelf….
And last Tuesday, the police say, a hand gun was “revealed” during a New Jersey traffic stop of a car Jerome Reid was in.
None were “arrested without incident or injury.” They were all Black, killed by police officers. Brown was shot through the head. Garner was grabbed around the neck in a chokehold, tossed to the ground and held there, even as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe….Rice was shot within two seconds of the police officers’ arrival on the scene. Crawford…and Reid were also cut down by police bullets.
In the cases…heard so far,…grand juries have refused to indict the officers.
It seems walking, selling, playing, shopping or driving while Black is a death sentence. Racism produces super-profits for the bosses. The only answer is a death sentence for capitalism.