A black family in Los Angeles were detained and handcuffed by local police after they protected a local business from looting and flagged down the officers to pursue the looters.
The entire incident, which occurred in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, was captured by KTTV (Fox 11) Los Angeles. A few minutes before police handcuffed the black family, one of its members spoke on camera to the news outlet.
This is how ingrained racism and implicit bias runs in policing.
Black people can’t even do the right thing.
"He's not African American. His son's not African American," the black woman, who identified herself as a resident of the neighborhood, said, pointing to the shop owner and his son. "But you're not going to come to our city and tear our city up when this man has been here for over 30-plus years. And I help everybody out on this block."
But then, minutes later, after confrontations between the family and looters were caught on camera and the police were flagged down, the woman and her family members were put in handcuffs. Frantically, the reporter for Fox 11 tried to tell the officers that they'd detained the wrong people.
I wonder what would have happened if the reporter hadn’t been on the scene.
In a follow-up report, the Fox 11 reporter showed that the woman and her family were OK and no longer detained. "She's OK, all right. She's OK, I promise," the reporter said, after sharing a hug with the woman.
Actually, I don’t wonder. They would have been arrested for looting.
It’s a damn shame that even a good deed needs to be cosigned by a white woman before cops will believe black people.
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