Rick Levine wrote that. He is a random writer on Twitter. Mr. Levine is on point.
. . .
I don’t watch these murders of Black people anymore on random videos. The killings go on despite the cameras anyway. When is enough, enough?
And I am old enough to remember Rodney King. Beaten nearly to death in Los Angeles and filmed by George Holiday, the Argentinian plumber who had just bought a new camera. Mr. Holiday, who recently died, changed history.
But I am also old enough to remember Arthur McDuffie. That was not caught on film, but news photographs afterward show a brutal slaying of a Black man by the Miami police. McDuffie was beaten to death by a gang of police officers. They beat him to death with nightsticks and then fabricated a crime scene to make McDuffie look like the attacker.
The officers were put on trial, and one of the officers flipped and testified against his blue comrades. The officers still beat the charges even though the “thin blue line” was severed. Miami Blacks erupted into violence. President Jimmy Carter came to Miami after the burning and shooting ended.
Many people I know call the photos and films of the injured and murdered men by police ‘tragedy porn.’ It is. I won’t watch these videos anymore. Should I say, I’ve seen enough in my short life. I am tired mentally of it. I am also tired of the United States of America not listening to African Americans on the question of how to fix this. There is only one way:
“Defund the Police.”
That doesn’t mean there will be no public safety departments or services in the cities of America. But it does mean we start over and set white supremacy, racism, and other ills of our country aside when designing public safety. Tear down the building. Rebuild one that is humane and does protect and serves the people, and answers to the people.
Every time there is an uptick in crime, the solution is to go Gestapo on the people. That is what happened in Memphis. Rodney King, Amadou Diallo (NYC), Sean Bell (NYC), and now Tyre Nichols were all killed by “special” police anti-crime units in their cities to address an alleged uptick in crime. It is bad, reckless, but intentional public policy.
I don’t need to see the aftermath of these inhumane policies in a continuous loop on the network news. I am old enough to remember seeing photos of dead Black men in newspapers or photos of police officers maiming and beating Black people to death. Now, society has films of these killings. There is no reason for me to watch it or look at it. There is no reason for the media outlets to show it.
Stop showing the lynchings of people for profit on television. And, by all means, let us get back to where society was in 2020 — Defund the police and start over.
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This post was previously published on AfroSapiophile.
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