Quickstop owner installs video cameras to protect his customers and employees from the police:
Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years. He’s been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times. Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana. Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing. Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.
But Sampson isn’t loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.
So how can he be trespassing when he works there?
It’s a question the store’s owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black. And, like Sampson, many of them have been cited for minor infractions, sometimes as often as three times in the same day.
Saleh was so troubled by what he saw that he decided to install video cameras in his store. Not to protect himself from criminals, because he says he has never been robbed. He installed the cameras — 15 of them — he said, to protect him and his customers from police.
Since he installed the cameras in June 2012 he has collected more than two dozen videos, some of which have been obtained by the Miami Herald. Those tapes, and Sampson’s 38-page criminal history — including charges never even pursued by prosecutors — raise some troubling questions about the conduct of the city’s police officers.
The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.
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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/21/3769823/in-miami-gardens-store-video-catches.html#storylink=cpy
Lots of people need to be held accountable for this travesty.
= new reply since forum marked as read
- So where is Justice? Oh, right. In Denver. Killing, maiming and torturing sick cancer patients again.....
K&R
Do I need a 
icon, fellow DUers?
I don't see a difference. The number of the times the same man's time was wasted at his place of employment, by those who had to have known he had a right to be there, indicates that living while black is a crime.
It's telling someone to 'get back in their place' and denying them the one that any rational person would grant them. Where is his lawful place, a plantation or a jail?
Okay, call it OTT, but what is the answer for the man doing his lawful best to be employed?
Miami Gardens PD is running a con game, degrading the rule of law and the Constitution. And it's the US Consitution, not the Confederate one. There is a huge difference in the two countries and their mindset on equality. The latter sees the man as a permanent slave by matter of color. EOM. The former denies that.
I am glad to see this store owner prove an obvious fact of life for too many citizens. How does one advance in life under such constant threat?
The Miami Gardens PD needs to be gone over just as thoroughly as this gentleman was. And I do mean gentle man because his patience and perserverance to do the right thing and go to work is an honor to civil society, which has not benefited him much.
This should be in the national news. Kudos to the store owner!
