Unfair Targeting Quotes
The police knew she was a leftist but most didn’t really understand what that meant. In those days, police were not very well educated and many had no more than a few grades of elementary school. They were assigned to keep order at her public speeches (where there were sometimes protestors threatening violence), but the police would often erroneously assume that something she would say was illegal—freedom of speech was not what it is today. She was quite used to the harassment. Most police at the beginning of the 21st century are still generally undereducated with only a small minority being college graduates.
Given that the Black population is less than 15 percent of the total, the odds against this occurring by chance is less than 100 million to one. The problem was then very hard to solve in that in most cases the cause was not anti-Black hostility. Rather it was that most police—including some Black police officers—were more fearful for Black males relative to white males and perceived themselves or the public in mortal danger much more often with Blacks than with whites in similar situations. Much of this was a historical societal bias and fear of Black males and much was the result of the disproportionate media depiction of violent Black males.
