Thursday, June 25, 2015

a moment of clarity.

 an ongoing discussion...

words.

"...But sitting in the van and watching people just living their lives, I started to see that these were just people. They weren’t that different from me. They had to pay rent. See their kids off to school. The main difference is that as a white kid growing up in my neighborhood, I was never going to get arrested for playing basketball in the street. I was never going to get patted down because I was standing on a street corner. There was no chance I was going to get a criminal record early on for basically being a kid. As a teen, I was never going to get arrested for having a dime bag in my pocket, because no one would ever have known. There was just no possibility that a cop was ever going to stop me and search me.

When you watch people for hours and hours like that, you start to see the big picture. You start to see the cycle of how these kids get put in the system at a young age, often for doing nothing wrong, and how that limits their options, which pushes them into selling drugs or other crime. You start to see that they never had a chance..."

THE WASHINGTON POST: An interview with the Baltimore cop who’s revealing all the horrible things he saw on the job

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