This is yet another indication of how marginalized the life and existence of black men are in the eyes of the police and the community as a whole. Society needs help when one’s eyes lie to them based on the hue of those being watched.
Another black man falls prey to police just because
Evanston Police released the dashcam video from 2015 that shows the arrest of a black man who was suspected of stealing a car that turned out to be his own. Fox 32 reported the following.
On October 10, 2015, Lawrence Crosby was working on his car around 7:00 PM when a woman passing by saw what she thought was an African American man breaking into a vehicle and stealing it. She called 9-1-1 and then followed the vehicle, relaying information to the dispatcher about the location. “Hi somebody’s trying to break into, somebody’s trying to break into a car,” the woman told the dispatcher. ”I Think the person just got into the car.”
Crosby, an engineering doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, was driving from his apartment to campus when he was stopped. He had his own dashcam video recording in his car, and before the stop, he can be heard talking to someone saying he thought he was being followed. He was reportedly headed to the police station because of those suspicions, when police pulled him over in a church parking lot. The dashcam video shows him get out with his hands up with a cellphone in his hand and he then gets taken down by officers who thought they were dealing with someone who stole a car. …
Crosby was charged with resisting arrest and disobeying officer, but a judge threw out those charges. Crosby filed a civil rights lawsuit against Evanston Police in 2016 and that case is now pending.
What drives many crazy with this incident and many like this is the utter disregard the police have for accepting responsibility for their screw up. Evanston Police found that the use of force was justified. The video is just the relevant snippet from a 40-minute video which was very disconcerting. The woman who reported the incident and kept police abreast of the location of the car was being consoled by the cops for ‘her mistake.’ Yet, the cops spent time finding reasons to arrest this black man who was minding his own business.
The problem here is that many people have a bias against people of color and the black man specifically. They lie to themselves. Their eyes lie to them. Americans are conditioned to equate crime with color when the reality is that crime is generally socio-economic in nature. Sadly neither news nor movies are doing their job in accurately reflecting America. In failing to do so, they create the environment where people’s eyes lie to them from the conditioning they receive every day.
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