They just beat them up and lock them up for no reason
by digby
If you out there, you’re gonna be locked up with a misdemeanor.”
Donnail Lee gives his young neighbor a dubious look. “They can’t lock everybody up,” he tells her.
“It’s what they said…” she replies, as police helicopters fly overhead.
It’s 20 minutes to curfew in Gilmor Homes—the housing project where Freddie Gray grew up—on Tuesday, the night after the rioters had looted businesses and burned down buildings in West Baltimore. Lee, 34, had known Freddie for nearly a decade and heard Gray’s screams when he was detained by police around the corner from Lee’s home. A bystander’s video shows officers pulling Freddie into their car, his leg appearing to be bent under him. Freddie died days after being in police custody from a spinal cord injury, whose cause is still being investigated.
“They’ve been doing this for years—just people couldn’t prove it,” says Lee, sitting on the front stoop of his home while his three young kids sleep inside. At Gilmor Homes, the stories are around every corner of these identical red-brick buildings, which lie just blocks from the charred remains of the CVS.
Sherry Johnson, 40, remembers being thrown on the ground and kicked in the stomach by police who detained her and her cousin. She told them she was pregnant just to get them to stop—so they switched to using their elbows instead. “They said we ‘fit the description,’” recalls Johnson, who had no idea why she was being arrested. The charges were later dropped.
This is why people are pissed. Yes, they want jobs. Of course they want opportunity. And yes their lives are shit in a million different ways. These complicated problems in America’s inner city are our nation’s shame and they must be fixed.
But we don’t have to fix the problem of poverty in order to make the police stop brutalizing citizens for no reason. That’s really not complicated at all. They work for us.
By the way, they won’t be telling anyone what happened in that van until next week at the earliest. No hurry, I guess.
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