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Submitted by a.future.with.n... on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 4:15pm.
Where to begin? I think my first run ins with the police were during my 8th grade year. they would come around the teen center, the back of the strip mall, the park and find whoever they could, mostly young kids 13 or 14. they would take our cigarettes and make us crush each one. now this wasn't so bad, losing the cigarettes. what was wierd about it was how much they seemed to enjoy it. these weren't the friendly mustached officers who ran DARE. these were bald huge men who in every way resembled the jocks who regularly picked on me and called me fag. i began to associate the police with bullies. i have never been disproven.
» Now crushing the cigarettes, even if done in mean spirits isn't a really good reason to hate or distrust police. At the time, i didn't hate or distrust them for it. That didn't start until they started getting violent. At first it was small stuff. they would cart around this hammer in the back of thier squad cars and break our skate boards in front of us for no reason. i mean no reason, like we were at the teen center skate park no reason. the teen center eventually called and complained but then they would just wait across the street from our school for us to skate off. they'd stop us and take our boards away. when i told my parents about it they said i must be lying and that i did something wrong to have them take my board away. even to them it was my word against a cops. they got brazen after the skate board thing (which happened in a wave during most of 1998) and started carrying around bolt cutters. during the summer, if you were out at night riding a bike, they would stop you and cut the bike chain. This was something i had heard about from my chicano friends, it was a regular practice to cut the chains of laborers as they biked to work at night. apparently the cops had some much fun with it they moved the practice on to high school freshmen. It's not the same as being beaten but having your bike destroyed three miles from your house at ten o'clock at night, given a curfew ticket and forced to walk home with a broken bike in the dark alone is terrifying. evry time you see a cop drive by you have to hide. afrter a while you start feeling hunted because you're young. As a white kid in southern california, this kind of stuff was preferential treatment. my chicano friends were regularly hand cuffed and detained, arrested because they "fit the description of a run away". Thier mothers had to regularly pick them up from the police station on charges that would later be dropped. There is just no way to explain to your mom that you, a fourteen year old male who was hanging out in the park got arrested for no reason. you just can't do it and the cops knew that. thats how they'd get away with it. they're still getting away with it.
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And...
Submitted by vincent_vega on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 7:14am.