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Innocent 12-year-old girl to blame for police brutality
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So. Imagine for a minute that you are a twelve-year-old girl, and you've popped out into your backyard at your mom's behest to flip a breaker after the electricity went out. Three men pull up in an unmarked,windowless van, yell about you being a prostitute, and grab you, intending to stuff you into the van. Do you:
A.) Fight back;
B.) Grab on to a tree and scream for help; or
C.) Assume you are under arrest and cooperate quietly?
Those of us who ever had a "what to do if you are being kidnapped" lesson, and/or who had a similar talk with our kids, would pick some combo of A and B. It turns out, however, that the correct answer, at least in Galveston, Texas, is C. To wit: Dymond Milburn, a 12-year-old honor student, is currenlty facing trial for resisting arrest as a result of choosing B. The men who grabbed her (and who beat her so badly about the head and neck she was hospitalized) were undercover cops who were, so they've said, intending to arrest adult, white prostitutes in an area two blocks away from the Milburn home. It makes since, then, that they would grab up a black child minding her own business in her own yard. And that three grown men would have to beat a little girl into submission to arrest her. And that a black female in "tight shorts" is logically a prostitute, regardless of her age or the setting. Ahem.
(Oh, and her father was also arrested for interviening when he saw three random men attempting to drag his screaming little girl into a van. Apparently, the correct response in this situation is to calmly call a lawyer, or something.)
Now, the cops' story is so unbelievably stupid and illogical that I'm not alone in thinking that this was actually an attempted kidnapping by people who had a day job to fall back on as an excuse when it went bad. But be that as it may, this is the sort of thing that makes me understand why Ariel Gore once quiped about having a nervous breakdown when her child asked if the police are the good guys or the bad guys. I mean, seriously -- what are we supposed to tell our kids? "If you're lost, go to a police officer" just doesn't seem quite right when you've been presented with cops who would act like this, and an entire department which backs them up. (Actually, an aside: kids can't always tell the police from any other uniformed personel, and it's better to tell them to ask for help from a woman with kids.) And what -- "If men are trying to take you away, do what they say if they claim to be cops, even if they aren't acting like it, haven't shown you any proof, and are scaring the crap out of you"? Not that these guys seem to have announced who they were, but still. I've always told my kids that when a cop tells you to do something, do it right then, with visible hands, and argue your case afterwords, but something tells me that Dymond Milburn may have saved herself from worse than a beating that night; and I certainly would want any of my kids in a similar circumstance to do exactly what she did -- fight back and scream for help.
But seriously -- what do you tell your kids? I tell them how to be safe at protests, and never to run from the police, but that's not going to do the trick, is it? I'm certainly in a privileged position, because my kids are white, and so are unlikely to end up on the wrong end of one of these incidents. But what about the guy who says, "Hey, little girl, I'm a cop, and you need to come with me"?
So I remain in a quandry. One thing I do know, though, is that I agree with a poster to the blog in the first link in hoping that Dymond wins the lawsuit she's filed, hopefully to the tune of a few million dollars, and uses it to go through Harvard Law School "and embark on a career of suing the pants off of cities that don't keep their police under control." It's the very, very least the Galveston Police Department owes this traumatized child.
ETA: Great minds think alike, I guess -- my fellow Examiner covered this a couple of days ago, and I really like what he had to say about it.
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