This Is Not a Gun: So, Officers, Stop Shooting Unarmed Black Men

[tblue37]

38. About that waistband reach--if the cops were screaming at him to

"Drop the gun!," as they pulled up, the kid might have actually been trying to obey their forcefully shouted orders. It was all so sudden that attempting to obey might have been automatic.

Think of that young man shot when he reached in his car for his wallet when the cop ordered him to show ID. I bet that young man knows perfectly well how dangerous it is for a black man to make any sudden reaching moves in the presence of a cop, especially since, as witnesses all say, the idiot cop already had his gun out and pointed at the guy for a freaking seatbelt violation (!). But when the cop demanded ID while approaching aggressively with his gun at the ready, the man made a quick, apparently reflexive, move to comply, which the cop interpreted as reaching for a gun.

The cop even said the man reached into the car "aggressively." When cops are so sure that *every* black man is a crazed murder machine, they shoot at any movement. Since the kid was just a kid, and since cops were zooming up at him and probably screaming at him to drop the gun, he might have just been trying to do as he was being told to do.

I read about a study which indicated that when shown images of black children--especially boys--cops greatly overestimated the kids' ages, whereas they were quite good at guessing the age of white children. Civilians have also been shown to overestimate the age of black children's. The 911 caller wasn't sure the child was a child, though he did say he *might* be a "juvenile." But even calling him a juvenile suggests he thought he was a teenager, and black teens are as scary--maybe even scarier--to jumpy white people (especially cops) as black men are. Whites see a black teen and assume "gangbanger."