"In one experiment, a group of 60 police officers from a large urban police force were asked to assess the age of white, black and Latino children based on photographs. The officers were randomly assigned to be told that the children in the photographs were accused of either a misdemeanor or felony charge. The officers overestimate the age of black felony-suspected children by close to five years, but they actually underestimated the age of white felony-suspected children by nearly a year."
Read More on "Why prosecutors keep talking about Tamir Rice's Pants Size"
I hope most of us knew this already -- not the exact numbers quoted, but the fact that white people see a big black guy when walking past them even if that man is, in reality, a 130 pound black man that's 5 foot 2 with the complexion no darker than Prince's.
That white officer assuming that Tamir Rice was a grown man despite the baby face Rice had wasn't even close to unique. I've walked past a group of four or five black and latino kids with a white person beside me then later listen to them relate to another white person how we walked past a huge gang, estimating the group's size at ten to twelve.
I believe white people multiply and magnify us due to their belief that we hate them back for racism. I believe that descendants of white slave owners, descendants of slave catchers, and descendants of poor white farmers that turned in runaway slaves are all battling Slave Master Mentality at some point in their lives
That is,
today's white people
in the United States
are all descended from people who
believed it was right and natural
that out of control, violent black people
be controlled, owned and mastered by
superior white people.
I think this mental deficiency has been passed down from white generation to white generation. This combined with the fear of black revenge, for enslaving us, makes the white people crazy violent with fear. And if you are crazy violent with fear while also refusing to admit..
1) your fear of current revenge --that you deep down know your ancestors deserve,
2) your cowardice,
...then it stands to reason that, within your own mind, you're going to make your adversary bigger and stronger than he or she actually is so as not to admit to yourselves that you are fearful cowards --fearful cowards afraid of your own history.
In this context, the beating of Rodney King, the murders of Miriam Carey, Mike Brown, Natasha McKenna, Quintonio LeGrier, Bettie Jones, and Tamir Rice by scared-to-death white cops all make sense....to white juries, grand and otherwise.
In this context, it makes sense that blacks (enslaved in the past) and Native Americans (genocide-ed in the past) are the ones being killed by scared-to-death white cops at highly disproportional rate of speed even when they don't have weapons.
Furthermore, it occurs to me that slave owning mentality is the difference between white people here in the U.S. and the white people in Europe -- which is why the same thing does NOT appear to be happening to black people across the pond. There is racism in these countries. Do not mistake me. Black and brown people just aren't being hunted by white cops like they're animals there -- as far as I can tell.
Darren Wilson made out like Mike Brown --who was a big person in reality-- was a huge, superhuman demon and murdered Brown based on his own racist fears. "Demon" was the actually word this racist mental midget used. And this Officer Loehmann's testimony apparently did the same kind of magnification of Tamir Rice and a Cleveland grand jury has basically responded,
"It's okay. We would have been afraid
of the big black man too"
even though
he turned out to be
a 12 year old child
Only when the shooter is white can and the jury is white can you play a horrific video over and over again and convince that jury that the person lying on the ground -- Rodney King or Tamir Rice-- is the one that provoked the violence. The white jury automatically understands without it very being said aloud that it was the black skin itself that was scary and life threatening.
This is the only way I can explain to myself how a white man rolls up on a 12 year old black child and kills him in 2 seconds ON VIDEO and the prosecutor (not some sort of defense attorney) makes it sound like an accidental O.K. Corral shoot out because two grown men with guns surprised each other.
In 2 seconds officer Loehmann didn't have time to THINK anything AT ALL. He just shot at black skin. Period. He didn't even have time to assess if Rice was reaching for his weapon. He shot Rice too fast to assess ANYTHING. He should have gone to trial for that alone -- even if turned out, in the end, that there wasn't enough evidence to reach the standard of reasonable doubt.
Those two officers shouldn't have rolled up so close to someone they supposedly thought had a gun. Why would Loehmann get out and put himself in that kind of danger if they REALLY thought that boy was a danger to him? White officers have told us again and again and again how afraid they are of us when we are UNARMED. Why did the driver roll up close to Tamir Rice and have Loehmann get of out of the car sans any sort of cover, and shoot?
I say that coward, Loehmann, wasn't afraid of a thing when he got out of that car. I say that idiot, Loehmann, has proven he's an idiot in multiple ways - on tests and via rejection from other police departments. But the Cleveland grand jury bought fear of black skin anyway.
Think about the conflicting stories on Tamir Rice from another angle - Tamir's motive.
When the story was first told, Tamir was shot because he thought be a grown man waving a gun around on playground. Now, according to the prosecutor --NOT any sort of defense attorney-- according to the prosecutor we are to believe that Rice was not only a child, but a mentally deficient child who thought he could out draw a police officer and win ...with a toy gun.
Mike Brown was supposed to be insane as well. Brown supposedly reached inside Darren Wilson's car and tried to grab Wilson's gun....for no reason other than he's black (who knows what THOSE PEOPLE are thinking) That's the story that the white folk believed when they let Wilson walk, right? This is only close to believable when you think black usually contains violent and crazy.
Worst than anything is this:
If the grand jury had seen through the prosecutor efforts to get the Officer Loehmann off by doing a Rodney King interpretation of the Tamir Rice video and indicted Loehmann anyway, this same prosecutor would have been prosecuting the officer during the trial going up against this cop's defense attorney. That is, both the prosecutor and the defense attorney would have been working to get the officer off during the trial.
Do you see how pointless the system is when the POLICEMAN'S CLOSEST ALLY, THE PROSECUTOR, is the one to sent to present a case to the grand jury? Why is this okay? You couldn't get a system more biased in favor of the police if the police officer and the prosecutor were two of three triplet brothers with the trial judge showing up as the third triplet.
I can't remember where the prosecutor stood in the Rekia Boyd case, but it was a Chicago judge that set her killer, Dante Servin, free. Michael Brelo, yet another Cleveland Officer, stood on a car hood and shot down into a car and killed two unarmed black people, and it was the judge that let him walk as well.
These groups, police, prosecutors, and judges, work together daily to prosecute criminals. We expect that they're going to turn on one another when one of them "makes an honest error" (ha-ha) by mistaking one n-word for another n-word and kills him or her? Really?
The system is broken, and it's broken before you even add race and racism to it, in my opinion.
1) There has to be another entity that takes police murder cases to the grand jury. I think a special prosecutor, or some such person, should come from out of state.
2) The grand jury process cannot be done in the dark anymore. No more secret grand jury. Let each juror make a decision in the light and live with it.
3) There needs to be a process where judges can be called on the carpet and fired when their "judgment" is blatantly unjust.
EVEN IF it had taken 32 seconds instead of 2 seconds for Officer Loehmann to shoot a child, on a playground, who was holding a toy gun -- it would have been worth it to go to trial to see what's what if the cop, the would-be-prosecutor, and judge weren't routinely in bed together.
If white racism were to disappear tomorrow we'd still have to fix this.
MORE ON HOW TAMIR RICE GRAND JURY PROCESS WAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWNhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/29/in-tamir-rices-case-the-grand-jury-process-was-turned-upside-down/
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