A lawyer friend of mine told me years ago, “There are two criminal justice systems in America, one for the rich and one for the poor. Never doubt that for a minute.” I had another friend, a co-worker who was Black and who had a teenage son, tell me that there were two systems of law enforcement, one for Blacks and one for whites, and that if I had a kid, my kid would automatically be treated differently than hers — unless his father was Black and he came out looking Black. Then and only then would I know what she went through. The news stories that have broken in the past year and just now in the past few  days have had me thinking about both those conversations.

Here’s the body cam footage on the Daunte Wright shooting.  TRIGGER WARNING: This is graphic. If you have anything in your psyche that could be triggered by this subject matter, exercise judgement.

The officer’s probable cause in pulling Wright over was air fresheners hanging from his rear view window. Now I’m going to kick in my own two cents here, because this triggered me. As a young woman I used to get stopped by the cops all the time. I found out later on, from a friend’s brother who was with the Denver P.D. that cops did that, pulled over good looking young women driving alone — and they would cobble together any excuse at all to justify having done so.

So I got pulled over one time while driving to a friend’s house at 4:30 a.m. because we were going to drive up to the mountains and watch the sun rise, because my “flicker flacker” was broken. I’m quoting the cop. That’s what he called a turn signal. He told me I didn’t signal for a turn and I said yes I did and turned on the signal and it worked. He said that “the flicker flacker was broken just a minute ago.” But he got what he wanted, I guess, his moment of confrontation, dominance, whatever the deal was supposed to be.

Another time I got pulled over because the cop “wanted to see if the front window was tinted like the rear” which was totally bullshit and I told him so. It wasn’t legal to tint a front windshield, you couldn’t have gotten it done if you wanted it. This was back in the eighties and tinted glass was a new thing, and I had it on a red sporty car with the tee tops off and I was young and my hair was blowing in the breeze and that’s why the cop stopped me, no other reason — again, according to my buddy, the cop in Denver.

So the air freshener bit is nonsense. That’s as stupid as the flicker flacker or the tinted front windshield.

I told my anecdotes about being stopped by the police to my Black co-worker, Liz, and she told me that I was lucky on those occasions to be white. She said that had I been a black woman, alone, I might have been raped because the cops did that.

I don’t want to sound anti-cop here. I’m merely expressing two things, one, my personal experience as a young female getting pulled over when I was by myself, because that’s what some predatory cops look for, according to one of their own.

And the second thing is that I cannot overstate how appalled I am at the over the top, in your face traffic stops of Black men that escalate into physical harm and even death. I am beginning to believe more and more that Liz was right and there are two systems of law enforcement, and that is frightening. And absolutely there are two systems of criminal defense. The accused who can afford a white shoe law firm and the accused with a public defender are on two different planets.

The bottom line of all of this is racism. That’s the sad truth.

 

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