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How do campus
police treat black male students?
As
an African American man who was raised in West Africa and received both his
undergraduate and graduate education from Kent State University in Ohio, I was
severely traumatized by police harassment as a student because of my race,
gender, age, and ethnicity in the 1990s. I have had guns pointed at me jokingly,
commanded to stop or lie on the ground, asked not to enter a restaurant for
lunch while the open sign was up, and had dogs stop me while being trained. All
these incidents happened on my way to class and I was still expected to be as
productive as other students.
How does campus
police stop black male students?
I
soon noticed that about 95% of the time that police stopped me, it was based on
an incident that never happened and the other times, it was factual, but my
words or actions were intentionally twisted to make me look like I had committed
a crime. Most of the time, I had assumed that it was these white police officers
that were lying against me just to arrest a black teenager and each
argumentative encounter lasted for at least 5 minutes until one of the officers
would convince me that an incident was actually reported against me.
Since the incidents were usually a fabrication, I had to rely on a good
description of the person or what I said to the person, but the police would
either give false description of the complainant to protect them or give false
statement of what I said because they wanted to make an arrest. Fortunately for
me, I was popular and well liked, so many white students would vouch for me as
witnesses openly. This is why I was never shot at, killed, or arrested and it
happened every other month. |
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Who secretly
calls police on black male students?
It
was when I got to about my junior year that I saw the pattern that it was the
black females that were giving false report to the police about me. White
students may call the police publicly if there was some cultural and social
misunderstanding, but those secret false calls that left me confused were from
the black females who were happily standing nearby to enjoy the arrest. After I
was dismissed by police, I would either see white students demanding that the
police arrest some black woman who tried to speak with me earlier or a black man
would come to me later to identified who it was that spoke to the police.
The
sad and painful reality is that police never believes that the black man is
telling the truth or is innocent after a complaint has been made against him. I
was asked to produce a witness or go to jail even when I now understood who may
have called the police on me. Police usually tries to make an arrest after I had
walked away from the witnesses and prevent me from going back to get witnesses.
Sometimes, police would say that the video was not working, was in the wrong
direction, or did not show what I stated whenever I need it to prove my case
because the police wanted to protect the complainant.
How are police trained against black male students?
Police should never allow the need for complaints to tackle crime or just to
arrest black men to be more important than the integrity and credibility of the
complaint. Unjust arrests and police brutality usually occurs if a false
complaint is used to turn police and black men against each other. From my black
teenager experience, it seems that white police are trained to arrest black
males regardless of the situation without non-black witnesses to vouch for them
and black males tend to get argumentative with police when they feel that it is
the police intentionally lying against them just to make an arrest.
Did
the complainant intentionally tell the police that: The black man had a gun, but
it was actually a cell phone? The black male jogger was always the one stealing
in the neighborhood? The black man, who was bird watching, was trying to harm
her and her dog? The wanted black drug dealer lives in that house where no drug
was found? The black professor entering his home is breaking into a home? Or the
black man with the counterfeit money does this all the time, but he did not
escape? There is no smoke without fire. Police harassment and police brutality
are just smoke, but how the compliant was reported against blacks is the fire
that put police on high alert to protect their own lives forcefully. |
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