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"I don't do anything that would get the police interested in me." Isn't that what every self-righteous nimrod says to reassure himself (or herself) that (s)he's not going to end up as another statistic on wrongful deaths caused by police?
Sean Bell wasn't doing anything wrong when he and his friends got hit with 50 bullets total. Unless you count being a young black man in a "bad" neighborhood and supposedly having a loud argument with another person of similar age, gender, and skin color as "wrong," which you shouldn't, not in a society that respects the basic right to human dignity of all its citizens.
Unfortunately, we don't live in that society. As cases like Sean Bell's in New York and Cameron Todd Willingham's in Texas show us, law enforcement officials who define good and evil through the lens of their own god complex have been all too willing to abrogate the rights of other human beings, particularly when those human beings are in a group that they've already predetermined as wholly evil and deserving of punishment. That is what we see in Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona: another law enforcement official who treats his badge as a license to mete out justice as he sees fit, to whomever he sees fit, because --- and let me get my Judge Dredd on --- "HE IS THE LAW!"
Even worse, there are too many people in this great country of ours that are either so frightened of the boogeymen the media tells them are waiting in the shadows behind their homes or cars or so apathetic to the abuses of power perpetrated and perpetuated by our legal system that they are fully supportive of this kind of law enforcement. Often, you'll hear them spout inanities like, "They're protecting us from the bad guys, why are you getting so uptight about how?" or "They must have done something to get on the cops' radar." They say all that while completely ignoring or overlooking that the U.S. Constitution has provisions against that kind of carelessness and abusiveness in meting out "justice," and not just for the sake of the "actual criminals," but for the sake of the innocent people who do get mistakenly accused or suspected, like Willingham in Texas and Bell in New York.
Being a "good guy" or a "law-abiding citizen," in your own estimate, is no guarantee of protection from abuse of power by law enforcement in this society. It hasn't been for a long time, if ever. Too many people in this country, and even more severely in others, have been singled out and "punished" as criminals for no more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time or, in many cases, being the wrong race (or ethnicity) in the wrong place, and too many people are blind to this reality because they assume they are part of a protected class, said class often being membership in the dominant culture and its attendant sociopolitical privileges and socio-cultural mores. I have one thing to say to those people.
You may be protected, but they're not, and eventually . . . you won't be, either.
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