Breanna Edwards

Turns out you can’t even be a politician while black in these American streets. A black Oregon state representative, who was out canvassing and checking in on her community had the cops called on her by one of her constituents.

It be your own people.

But seriously, Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Democrat, who is running for a second term in the state House of Representatives this fall, was knocking on doors and chatting to the residents for about two hours in Clackamas, when a deputy pulled up on her, Oregon Live reports.

Bynum had been taking notes on her cellphone from a conversation she had just had with someone at her second to last stop of about 30 homes when she was on her list that day when she saw the patrol car and immediately saw it for what it was.

“I don’t believe this,” was her first thought, she told the news station.

The deputy asked Bynum if she was selling something. Bynum introduced herself as she was, a state legislator just trying to find out the best way to serve her community.

The deputy confirmed that someone had called and reported Bynum because she was spending too much time at houses in the area and appeared to be “casing” the neighborhood, and making notes about it on her phone.

I think these white moms been reading too much John Grisham or James Patterson or something because what the hell?


https://www.theroot.com/campaigningwhileblack-someone-called-the-cops-on-an-o-1827342703?utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=theroot_twitter

Lawrence Crosby

I was face down on the pavement. One police officer was kneeing me in the back, while others pulled or punched. They paid no attention to my screams identifying myself as an engineering Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. They just kept punching. One shouted, "Stop resisting!"

The record is on the dash-cam footage: It's nighttime. I step out of my car, bewildered at being pulled over and surrounded by police vehicles in the college town I've lived in for years. I hold my hands up high, shocked to see several guns pointed at me. It turns out a fellow student had called the police to report that someone was trying to steal a car. That someone was me. The car was my own. I had a key.

"I don't know if I'm, like, racial profiling," the woman had told the 911 dispatcher. To her and to the police, I was a black man in a hoodie. After the cops arrived, after they tackled me, and after they determined that the car was, indeed, my own, they charged me anyway.

Resisting arrest, they said. One cop joked to another that I "should feel lucky" he didn't shoot me.

I don't feel lucky. Every time I see the video from that October 2015 encounter, I experience fear, anger and terror. Fear that the color of my skin will make me out to be a criminal when I have broken no laws. Anger at the blatant disregard for human life and rights that the Constitution is supposed to guarantee to all citizens. Terror to have come — perhaps — within seconds of being shot by people sworn to serve and protect.

Amadou Diallo, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, Philando Castile. Their stories — like many others — are all too familiar. They all suffered gross overreactions by officers of the peace. Unfortunately, you will never hear their side of the stories, as they didn't get the chance to speak before being shot to death. But you can hear mine.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-police-evanston-racial-profiling-black-man-0704-story.html