Indian-American woman detained while walking, police question her immigration status (She is a U.S Citizen)
baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/...
baltimoresun.comPosted Jan 28, 2017, 4:52 AM UTC
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baltimoresun.com"Walking while brown?" Pillalamarri said she then asked the officer.
My advice is: don't do this. From the article, it's clear that only after she did this, did the cop retaliate by taking the interrogation further. It's a delicate line. The officer is doing his job which he has to when they receive a call. It's BS, I know. I was stopped like this a few years back for roughly the same thing. At best, you can question around it like "I don't understand why I'm being stopped". They get the message without putting them on the defensive.
The minute you imply they are racist, it escalates the situation; in some cases, they may not be, they are just trying to do their job. (If they are racist, you still have to comply; try to get their name or badge ID; the time to deal with is later through a complaints process, not in real time through a confrontation). Hard as it is when you're indignant that race plays a role in the stop, you have to try to have the presence of mind and awareness to know that reacting in anger and putting the cop on the defensive won't make the situation better. (also see Chappelle on "when keeping it real goes wrong" and Chris Rock's "How to not get your ass kicked by the police")
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Shouldn't police be held to a higher standard or at least to point where you can say something as harmless as "walking while brown" without fear of pissing off some roid induced white cop with anger issues and getting your ass handed to you?
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The cop acted stupidly in response to this question. But you can't ask them to not be human; it's human nature to get defensive when people accuse you of being racist.
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This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 89%. (I'm a bot)
Police agencies in Harford County say they don't stop people just to check their immigration status, but the recent experience of a Bel Air woman raises questions about how clearly that's understood by officers on his streets, the town's police chief admits.
Bel Air Police Department Chief Charles Moore, who's led the agency since September 2015, said he's not sure if his department has a policy specifically dealing with questioning a person's immigration status, but added: "If there isn't one, there will be."
On the morning of Dec. 21, Aravinda Pillalamarri was walking in her Bel Air neighborhood, where she walks all the time, when she said she was stopped by a Bel Air Police Department officer.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Theory | Feedback | Top keywords: ask^#1 Office^#2 Police^#3 Moore^#4 Pillalamarri^#5
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Heh, almost forgot about the case of Sureshbhai Patel, an elderly Indian visitor who was knocked to the ground and partially paralyzed by police in Alabama. How come that case didn't get as much attention on either mainstream or social media, considering that the police officers were also acquitted in that case?
Easy, whites protect their own. We should do the same.
But that case was a clear civil rights violation, so......Oh, I guess Asians including Indians being abused by the system doesn't make for as juicy a story as police brutality against blacks in the realm of the Liberal Media. The Peter Liang Case was only as big as it was because our community made it so.
Peter Liang got thrown under the bus by his very own boys in blue, thank goodness the community stepped up.
The cultural left refuses to believe or take seriously that non-black POC get unfair treatment by the police. We don't fit into some larger narrative in their mind; each incident seems isolated to them. I think we have to be honest and admit that our situation is not as dire as blacks but at the same time, our cop interactions aren't as rosy as the average white person. If we do push back at the cops, we are seen as more threatening and do get dealt with more harshly. The way a white person can talk to a cop when they're stopped and get away with it; just unbelievable. Perhaps non-black POC need to bring up the notion of a "double standard" when dealing with the cops (a lesser charge but covers more serious implications); if we try to request equal concern towards "police brutality", we will be ignored on the more serious charge because the reality is on that front, our incidents are less common.
That treatment of Asians at the hands of police depends on socioeconomics as well. For example, an Asian in Cupertino has more chance of being hit by space debris than being stop and frisked by the police. At the same time though, in Richmond, CA, I don't know if its still the case, but South East Asian youths had the second highest per capita arrest rates after African Americans.
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