South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry

[Judi Lynn]

South Carolina Police Shooting Seen as Crime Strategy Gone Awry
By ALAN BLINDER and MANNY FERNANDEZAPRIL 9, 2015


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Rashard Brown, 30, complained that the police in North Charleston, S.C., had pulled him over twice in two months. Credit Gabriella
Demczuk for The New York Times
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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — It was after dark about five years ago, on a downtrodden strip of this city, when Alicia Delesline stopped trusting the police in the place where she had lived her entire life.

Ms. Delesline, 48, was walking to a store when she did something pedestrians do all the time: She suddenly changed her mind, and turned around to go elsewhere. Her movement caught the attention of a police officer, who stopped her and accused her of changing directions because she had seen the authorities farther ahead.

“They just rolled up and bothered me for no reason and searched me,” she said Thursday. “They serve and protect when they feel like serving and protecting. But when they feel like harassing, they do that.”

Ms. Delesline, who is black, is but one person in this city of 104,000 who has experienced the effects of a police campaign that began as an effort to rid North Charleston of its label as one of the country’s most dangerous cities in 2007.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/south-carolina-police-shooting-seen-as-crime-fighting-gone-awry.html

[Enthusiast]

1. Harassment of this sort, this institutionalized profiling, is horrible.

Just imagine having to live under these conditions.

[Binkie The Clown]

2. I read a book a while ago

about life in the "projects" in Chicago back in the 1980's. The one thing all the residents seemed to agree upon in their interviews was that the police were a far greater danger to life and property than the gangs. It was a given that you never called the police under any circumstances. They were not there to help you in any way.