is the title of this short piece by Eugene Robinson in the Post Partisan section of the Washington Post.
Robinson reminds us that the entire incident reeks of racial bias.
Gray was on a street corner. Not a crime.
He made eye contact with the police. Not a crime.
He ran from the police. Not a crime.
But he was a young African-American man in a depressed inner-city neighborhood, so he enjoyed a presumption of guilt, not of innocence. He never had a chance.
The police pursued him, caught him, and searched him.
The knife he had was legal under Maryland law, at which point he should have been released. He was not.
Then Robinson offers two paragraphs, which puts this all in the appropriate context:
Police officers exercise discretion every day. They don’t stop everyone they see walking in the street, selling loose cigarettes, driving with a broken tail light or loitering on a “high-crime” corner. They make choices. Far too often, they choose to assume that black men must be guilty of something – and look for reasons to arrest them.
Imagine what would happen if police cruised the nation’s wealthiest suburbs, looking for excuses to arrest people. Imagine the outrage if officers regularly patrolled golf courses, taking middle-aged white men into custody for illegally betting on the outcome of a match. Imagine how people would react if such a trumped-up arrest ended in the death of the person being arbitrarily detained.
Carry it further. Imagine March Madness if all the people participating in brackets for money were to be arrested for illegal gambling. Or every Sunday with pools for the NFL games.
Or consider just last night, where at the intersection of Penn and North in a Black section of Baltimore curfew violators were immediately arrested and people were pepper-sprayed and press were penned up, whereas in white Hampden three separate warnings to disperse were given, with police even saying they did not want to handcuff people.
Robinson's final sentence is absolutely on target:
But the “Black Lives Matter” campaign should continue – until they actually do.
The question is whether that day will ever truly come, or is the historic stain of racism as a part of America going to continue indefinitely?