This one blew my mind. I continue to categorize these behaviors as the Trump Effect because they are done more in the open, and when we catch the perpetrators, they are unapologetic and usually have a posse of defenders at large.
Police and other law enforcers will stop their brutality, murder, and racial profiling when the population at large develop the necessary empathy and acknowledge that one’s existence in a body of color presents an intrinsic danger, stress most in the majority population can imagine but would never live through.
The Trump Effect in action
Black patient hooked to IV arrested after going on walk outside hospital
An African American man recovering from pneumonia says he was arrested after a white security guard and police officers racially profiled him when he went for a walk on his doctor’s orders outside a northern Illinois hospital while attached to an IV machine and wearing a hospital gown.
Shaquille Dukes, 24, said that what at first appeared to be a misunderstanding escalated into an unnecessary confrontation with police and prompted his arrest and the arrests of two men with him.
“As they began to take me to the car, I told them … I never left the hospital property. And that’s when he [a police officer] turned and said, ‘Well you’re off hospital property now,'” Dukes told ABC News.
The incident unfolded just before 5 p.m. on June 9 outside Freeport Health Network Memorial Hospital in Freeport, Illinois, and was caught on cellphone video that went viral after Dukes posted it on his Facebook page.
Source: Black patient hooked to IV arrested after going on walk outside hospital – ABC News
What is sad is that in a country where one should be innocent until proven guilty that the chief of police felt his officers acted appropriately and that there was disorderly conduct.
“It was determined that he was likely not trying to steal any of the property. But the charges were supported for disorderly conduct with their actions toward the security guard,” Freeport Police Chief Todd Barkalow told ABC News.
The initial contact with this young man and the security guard was tainted in racism. It should not have occurred sans the security guard’s prejudice. The fact that this resulted in the arrest of a man with pneumonia with an IV still inserted means that the encounter with the police, was tainted with racism. Had he not been a person of color, he would have been escorted back to the hospital. Hell, I have left the hospital after being in the room for too long.
Again, living in a body of color means not only doing what is right but going out of the way to give what should be an unnecessary semblance of doing no wrong. That is only done in a society that can only be called racist in the aggregate.