Cop pulls gun on African American kids building a tree house

[tblue37]

42. A recent study showed that cops consistently overestimate the age

of a black child and also that they don't extend to black children the same presumption of age-based innocence that they extend to white children.

In other words, the cop looked at a black 11-year-old at play and probably "saw" (in his prejudiced, paranoid mind) an armed black teenaged "gangster," probably with a long record, including arrests for weapons violations and assaults.

They don't see black children as children at all, and don't consider them presumptively innocent, no matter how young they are. Even in preschool a black child who gets into mischief is likely to be treated as an uncontrollable criminal than as a little kid who is just acting up the way normal kids do when stuck inside and over-controlled. (The relevant study about these points was linked here on DU a couple of weeks ago.)