Jason Johnson: "It's like cops are their racism valets."

[EffieBlack]

On AM Joy this morning, Joy correctly noted that "[w]e tend to talk about police violence against black bodies, against black people. But we don't talk enough about people who keep calling 911 on black people for nothing."

Her guest Jason Johnson, of the Root.com responded that "It's like the cops are their racism valets. Like 'These black people are making me uncomfortable, come do something about it.' And the fact that she can engage in that kind of behavior so consistently and these are the gentlemen who have to deal with the consequences is another part of the discussion we need to have. That could be prosecuted as malicious prosecution. There should be consequences for people who call the police on African Americans for non-crimes for discriminatory purposes and we have to make that a part of the discussion because the police are just an extension of {that} bigotry when they make that phone call."

From Starbucks to Hashtags: We Need to Talk About Why White Americans Call the Police on Black People
https://www.theroot.com/from-starbucks-to-hashtags-we-need-to-talk-about-why-w-1825284087

By Jason Johnson

This week, black America added “sitting at Starbucks waiting for a white friend” to the list of things that we cannot safely do without fear of police violence. Previous entries included sitting in your car, sitting in someone else’s car, standing on your front porch, standing on your back porch, surviving a car accident, asking for directions to school and, of course, breathing.
...
The men and women making these outrageous and unwarranted calls to police, which result in the harassment, unfair prosecution and even death of people of color, need to be found, publicly shamed and prosecuted to the full extent that the law allows.

No, I’m not talking about Dave Reiling, the man who reported an actual crime in Sacramento, Calif., that the police used as an excuse to shoot Stephon Clark in his own backyard. Calling the police to report an actual crime that the police overact to is not the citizen’s fault, no matter what color he or she is. I’m talking about the hundreds of cases—that we know about—every year, where white Americans actively and knowingly use the police as an extension of their personal bigotry yet face no consequences.

I’m talking about the white woman at the Red Roof Inn outside of Pittsburgh who called the cops on me because I disputed the charges on my bill and asked to speak to a manager. I’m talking about the white woman who called the cops on me last year even though she knew I was walking with political canvassers for Jon Ossoff’s congressional campaign in North Atlanta. I’m talking about the police officer who followed me behind my house in Hiram, Ohio, asking where I lived because he’d “gotten some calls about robberies.”

In each and every single one of these instances, a white person used the cops as his or her personal racism valets, and I was the one getting served. In each of these instances, I could have been arrested, beaten up or worse based on nothing more than the word of a white person whom I made uncomfortable. As sick as this all is, I still consider myself lucky.