When Traffic Stops Go Bad -- How Cops Demean Black and Brown Men

[freshwest]

101. Same here. Also as a person growing up in a less enlightened era (huh?), here's what a co-worker

I was working with told me.

We worked together several years at my blue collar, union job outside. We both got job offers from government recruiters and he was wondering why I didn't want to try as air traffic controller, or city PD as it might be less physical work.

I said I didn't want to be an air traffic controller because of the hours and didn't want to be a cop, they had a bad reputation at the time. He had a chance to check it out and was taken out to one of the city's black neighborhoods to look for expired tags. They had a quota to get, I think that's illlegal now, but it may not be the case. The cop driving said that was their best hunting ground.

They were poor areas, more likely to have late tags. Sometimes one is short on finances, it almost happened to me once when I was struggling to pay for the basics and worried for a few months until I could afford to get it renewed.

My co-worker felt targetting minorities or the poor was despicable and decided that job wasn't for him. That was also an era when traffic stops resulted in a lot of harrassment and false arrests of innocent black men AND women. It was an outrage to both of us as whites, but it kept going on until we voted a civilian review board.

That's definitely institutional racism or else harrassing the poor. It's a technical stop that doesn't mean the driver is doing anything wrong but not meeting that requirement. Sure, the reason I was sweating that time was I didn't have the money to buy a new muffler and needed the car to go to work, although it wasn't smoking, it had a hole.

Tags also mean brakes are inspected and lights working. It's a good law for public safety reasons. I couldn't get the money for the muffler without driving the beast to work to get the money first, haha. And there was no one else to take care of that for me since I wasn't like Mittens who said to just borrow money from dad. As soon as I got paid, I got the muffler and tag.

But these things build up for the chronically lower paid or underemployed. Those who haven't thought this through or haven't walked in the shoes of the working poor, are calling these folks lazy or lawbreakers when their main crime is being poor.

The number of opportunities one misses in that economic state are not considered by those who haven't lived through it. Thanks for your post, too.