I know I said I wasn’t going to write until the MCAT was over but this crap is pissing me off. This is why I and most black guys hate cops, because of sh!t like this. An hour ago, I get a call and this is what I hear. There was a drug bust going on in an apartment building across the street from my friends apartment building. My friends heard the cops beating the hell out of someone so they ran out onto the balcony to see what was going on. They see this black guy all bloody and hand cuffed being kicked while he’s on the floor. At the same time, the handcuffed guy’s girlfriend and sister are yelling and cussing telling the cops to stop beating the guy since he’s already handcuffed. The sister asks the cop what his badge number is and the cops tries to arrest her too. Well the sister and the girlfriend begin to run away and one of the cops kicks her in the back to make her fall and handcuffs her. Well all the while my friends our on their balcony watching what’s going on. One of the cops on the street tells them to go back inside, and so they do. 30 seconds later my friend’s sister hears a group of people running up the stairs to their floor. The next thing you know, someone is kicking down their door. Well its her door, and she doesn’t want it kicked down, so she runs to it to open it up. Six white cops rush inside and arrest all the guys inside the house screaming and yelling asking who said “Fuck the police”. Now mind you, just about everyone in that building was outside on their balcony, so how did they narrow it down to that specific apartment? Well anyway, while my three male friends (two of which have been studying for the MCAT along with me the whole summer) are handcuffed on the floor, they are of course cussing because they have no idea why they are being arrested. No one inside that apartment said anything to any cop so they are all confused as to while they are handcuffed. One of my pre-med major friends that is handcuffed is screaming asking why they are arresting him and the cop kicks him in the face. When his sister asks the cop for his badge number and name, the cop tells her to shut the fuck up and punches her in the throat. They drag all the guys outside and put them in the police car. Their rights were never read to them; they never resisted arrest; they never yelled “fuck the police”. So now, with the MCAT 6 days away, they are sitting in jail. The suggested charge is “Disorderly Conduct” which is the most vague charge in the world. The bail bondsman was saying that you can’t even fight that charge because even blinking your eyes the wrong way could be just cause to be charged with disorderly conduct. They haven’t officially been charged yet because the cops have signed anything yet. So now they can be held up to 24 hours until the cops come. This is total bullshit. This is the shit that black guys have to deal with every day. Did the cops have any right to kick down their door? NO. Did the cops read anyone their rights? NO. Did the cops have any right to kick and handcuff a teenager, especially when no one resisted arrest? NO. Did the cops have just cause for even entering the apartment? NO.
So I was at the precinct for an hour trying to figure out whats going on. The bail (even though there isn’t a charge) is $400 per person. These guys who should be getting ready to do Kaplan section tests tomorrow are sitting in a jail cell for no freaking reason. The bail bondsman said that for all we know, when the cops get there, they could just drop all the charges and let them go, since they were really after the guy in the drug bust. But can they drop the black eyes and bruises that were left on my friends face? NO. This shit is ridiculous. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been pulled over for absolutely no reason. I guess they just want to see why a black guy is driving a BMW. Or the time my roommate had police shotguns pressed into his back on his way home from school all because he fitted a profile for someone they were looking for who was black and over 6 feet tall (that counts me in). I’ll probably be up all night until I’m sure what they’ve been charged with. These guys are good guys. GPAs all over 3.7, biology majors, studying for the MCAT. But I guess in this hick down of Huntsville, Alabama we are just good ole niggas. 60 years ago they probably would have been strung up on a tree somewhere, especially in Alabama.
The Land of the Free huh? Bull shit.
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UPDATE: Hey everyone. Thank for your prayers and advice and we will definitely follow up on that. We all agreed that after we take the MCAT on Sunday, we will head up to WAFF (an affiliate of NBC) down here, and give them all the information.
Anyway, I actually got to talk to one of my friends that was locked up a couple of minutes ago, and he basically told me how incredibly fast everything happened. He told me that most of the cops that had rushed their apartment had actually just arrived on the scene. So when they saw one cop running towards their apartment, all the recently arrived cops hopped out and followed him. So basically the cops that had just arrived kind of thought that my friends were part of the drug bust too. But all this was based on assumptions.
He also let me know that when they were in jail, and they were talking to the magistrate (the person who decides whether the charges will stick or not) the magistrate (who was black) was telling them that these 4 white cops bring up crap charges like this all the time. He told them that since he always throws out their crap charges, they will probably wait until 1:30 a.m. when he changes shifts with this white lady magistrate and push the papers through then for their case. And my friend (Donell) said that right on time at 1:32 a.m. the 4 cops came in and handed in their paperwork to the white lady who pushed the charges through.
He also told me that they watched the cops as they were writing up their report change their story 3 times (as in they balled up the paper and started over again). They twisted the story up tremendously. First they wrote that my friends were resisting arrest, but one of the cops wouldn’t go along with that, so they threw that out. Then they said the girls in the house for being disorderly, but since none of the girls were arrested they couldn’t go with that. Then they agreed on a story saying that they had told my friends to go back inside their apartment 3 times (which they didn’t, they told them once and my friends went inside) and as they went inside on the 3rd order, someone yelled from the apartment “Fuck the Police”. Now mind you, about 70 people were also outside on their balcony watching this, so there is no way they could have been sure it was them, and it wasn’t them. But that’s the story they wrote.
So yeah, we are just going to cool down at this point. They went to court at 8:30 this morning and pleaded not-guilty to their disorderly conduct charges. So now they have to work on getting lawyers and witnesss and crap. So yeah, pray for them.
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