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My latest column for MSNBC.com: Demilitarizing the police isn't enough

From:finneyk8@yahoo.com To: finneyk8@yahoo.com Date: 2014-09-02 13:55 Subject: My latest column for MSNBC.com: Demilitarizing the police isn't enough

Almost every black person I know, regardless of socio-economic status, has a story about a run-in with the police. If it didn’t happen directly to them, the story is about a friend or relative; some of us have also internalized and taken lessons from those stories growing up. If you’re lucky, you also have a good story involving a police officer, which counters the negative. Because like everyone else, you want to be able to trust and rely on the police. When I was about eight or nine years old, my father and I were pulled over late one night on a dark stretch of highway. Like a scene from a horror movie, it was late so there weren’t many other cars on the road, and it was very hot. We’d been visiting relatives in Martinsville, Virginia, and were heading back to New York City. I knew my dad hadn’t been speeding, so at first I honestly didn’t think much of it. As my father got out of the car he told me not to worry. But the terse and disrespectful tone in the officer’s voice as he questioned my father made things feel even tenser, which scared me. He had the power. Then he said, “Boy, you got some ID?” I’d never heard anyone speak to my father like that. I was stunned and then furious. Then I realized why we’d been pulled over – my father was a black man driving a nice car; that image just didn’t seem right to the officer, who was white. The officer was rude as he asked about where we were coming from and where we were going, I noted how patient my father was with these irrelevant questions. Finally, we were free to go. Part of the reason that incident has always stayed with me is how different the whole experience and tone of the interaction was from ones I’d had with my mother, who is white. That incident was long before police departments had military-style equipment at their disposal.... Demilitarizing the police isn't enough Demilitarizing the police isn't enough Beyond demilitarization and being aware of bias, we have to find ways to change actual police behavior. View on www.msnbc.com Preview by Yahoo