So that’s what they call it nowadays. It use to be called felony assault and battery. Many of you have recently read or heard about the policeman in Detroit who has been suspended for attacking a naked black woman in the emergency room of a hospital. For those who have not this is a recap of that incident. But before we go into this sorrowful chapter, lets get a little back ground.
“I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news.”
Naomi Wadler
Police violence against black women and women of color over the years has escalated. According to Andrea Ritchie, a leading advocate and researcher into police violence against women of color, is that data showing that the police violence against African American men that has horrified and galvanized the nation, impacts women of color just as much. According to Ritchie, “The perceptions of black women as animalistic, as overly strong, as menacing, as just not human, persist in the ways that police officers interact with them.” Police officers just punish black women for literally lifting their voice to ask a question because black women are perceived to have no right to do so. No right to insist on being treated with dignity.”
A report by Washington University in St. Louis, say’s, nearly 60 percent of black women killed by police are unarmed at the time of the interaction. While the odds of being killed by police when unarmed were about the same for black and white males, the high percentage of unarmed black women killed by police significantly increased the overall odds for unarmed blacks. “Our analysis finds that the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ slogan of the post-Ferguson movement becomes most relevant when you also ‘say her name,’” says lead researcher Odis Johnson, associate professor of education and of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. (The #SayHerName movement arose as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstream media’s tendency to sideline the experiences of black women in the context of police brutality and anti-Black violence. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of the AAPF, black women’s continued exclusion from stories about police brutality, racism, and anti-Black violence contribute to an erroneous notion that black men are the chief victims of racism and state-sanctioned violence and underplay issues such as rape and sexual assault by police.) The report goes on to say, “Nonetheless, the odds of an unarmed fatality for black Americans as a whole was a staggering 6.6-to-1, more than double the odds found in several other national studies completed in recent decades.” The “say her name” social movement was launched in 2015 to draw attention to the death of Chicago resident Rekia Boyd and other unarmed black women killed during interactions with police. This study is the first to provide hard data to back up the movement’s assertion that black women face a high risk of being killed by police.” Simply staggering! Please read the rest of the report here.
This assault on black women, brown women and on all women by the police has got to stop. One day it could be your mother, sister, aunt or even daughter who’s has been the victim of this wanton violence. One more thing I want you to know, every five days, a black women is assaulted and ends up in the hospital at the hands of the police. Now I want to show you something. An attack by a police officer on a naked mentally ill woman, while 3 other police officers stand by. The video is graphic and uses profanity. It “will” offend your sensibilities. If you have children, it is best to use headphones, or have them leave the room.
The officer has since been suspended and is awaiting an internal investigation. He has been suspended with pay.
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