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[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

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[hindustar.livejournal.com]

My husband and I kept trying to tell police that the guy under us was dealing meth and heroine, and went as far as to take down all the license plates and pictures of the cars and his "clients" using in our parking lot. Never arrested. (he was white)

Two black boys standing in front of the complex who live here, were arrested and rounded up by no less than 6 cops after someone called the police on them claiming they were selling pot. (they weren't. they were just smoking cigars outside because they don't smoke in their apartment, their sister has asthma.)

i really have lost faith ya' know.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

From Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com/142338/The-problem-is-Im-black-Thats-the-problem#5711127):

For what it's worth, I bought a house years ago and had lived in it for about six months when the several police came by one day looking for a man who, it turned out, had lived in the house years before. I told them I just bought the house and knew nothing about him, but gave them the name of the real estate company I bought it from and suggested they check with the people there. Okay - nothing more.

Until about six months later when I was on my way to work and opened the front door to find my yard full of police, some squatted down behind shrubs, some at the edge of the house, and it turned out there were a bunch of them in the back yard and side yards too - all obviously on alert, hands on guns, etc. I was a bit stunned and then one of the two officers on the sidewalk in front of me told me that they'd received a call about an emergency at my house ...

I said, nope, no emergency here. The officer stepped back and looked up at the roof over the porch where the house number was and said, again, an emergency at XXXX W XXXXXX ST - what a bunch of BS. She didn't even know the house number they were supposedly lookiing for for the emergency until she read it off the front of the house. I repeated NO - no one from here called for help. And then she said they'd received the call from Mr. X - the same man they'd been trying to locate earlier.

I was furious. My daughter and little granddaughter were watching this whole thing, as was everyone on the street - my new neighbors - and this was the biggest lie imagineable. That was one of the early awakenings on my behalf about the fact that police could lie and be downright scary when you'd done absolutely nothing wrong. But it took awhile for that to set in - in the meantime I exploded all over them, told them to get the hell out of my yard, that they knew that no one called for help, etc. I told them that if they'd asked - the first time or this time - I'd have let them go through the house looking for evidence that I was hiding this man - they could even bring shovels and dig up the crawl space looking for his bones if they wanted to, but now that they'd approached my home and family like we were escaped felons, they could get a damn warrant if they wanted to search my property. I walked them backward out of the yard and they went away.

I went back in the house and cooled down a bit and got the kids settled down, then went to work. On the way to work, I was followed by a police car - all the way to the hospital where I worked. That's when the reality began to make my skin crawl - the reality that you can't win against police and you're a fool to let your anger show.

Now I'm as white as the driven snow and this incident here in Spokane was about 20 years ago. I know that if the same thing happened today, even though I'm white, I'd probably be hurt or killed for showing aggression toward the police even when they were wrong, and I'm absolutely positive that if I were black and did the same thing, I'd be shot and killed on the spot.

[hindustar.livejournal.com]

Police are so scary. And they get away with it.

[angelcerv25.livejournal.com]

I knew this was in Spokane. To this day, our police make the news every day.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

I wish I was surprised by that. ;(

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

There is quite a bit of content on this disconnect within the police ranks in the excellent book on cognitive dissonance, "Mistakes Were Made but not by me."