When a 23-year old Latino was stopped for what police called, “a routine pedestrian stop” no one imagined the tragedy that would ensue from this seemingly innocuous encounter.
According to a police spokesperson, the young man was being patted down when he inexplicably decided to make a run for it. He wasn’t a suspect for anything, nor was he found to be in possession of any contraband. Only he knows why he took off, but one could easily assume that, like so many others in our marginalized inner-cities, he simply got tired of being picked on by the police. And though it isn’t a crime to run from the cops, unless, of course, you’re a felony suspect, the penalty for his passive resistance, unfortunately, was death.
Even more unfortunate is the fact that these types of bloody occurrences happen with a dreadful frequency in our penniless venues – almost exclusively so.
Police cruisers deployed to patrol the city streets are commonly used to “occupy” select neighborhoods, and as a result the citizens in them become hapless subjects of profiling, discrimination and distressing illegal searches — searches that culminate in extremely disproportionate arrests and imprisonment of people of color and the poor – primarily for illegal drugs.
Yet we see the elite – Tinseltown celebrities, athletes and politicians – addicted and entangled in a voracious web of illegal drug habits. But these are comfortably guided through the bright and colorful doors of rehabilitation centers, while people of color and the poor are chained and escorted through the unforgiving gates of penitentiaries – too often never to be released.
For America’s elite, rehabilitation is a foregone conclusion. For too many of America’s poor, prison is tantamount to destiny; as if to say the poor are somehow genetically incapable of rehabilitation.
There was a day, not long ago, when the elite – politicians and the financially affluent – prohibited women from holding jobs, public office or even owning property. Women were labeled incompetent. They also said blacks, Indians and others were subhuman.
For the most part, American society has overcome these retarded lines of thought; yet discrimination is so many other forms persists.
As the stereotypes of yesterday were indisputably proven wrong by those with moral vision, so too, must we continue to dispel the vicious myths of the myopic in our day.
Either the elite should be treated with the justice of the poor, or the poor should be treated with the justice of the elite. But we can’t continue to have two Americas. They tried that with the Confederacy and the Union states – the division brought this country to its knees. It’s really quite simple: Justice must be justice across the board, or else, it really isn’t justice.