Diversity isn't data. It's about asking the hard, human questions, and involving everyone across an organization.
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Wednesday, June 17, 2020
BET Co-Founder Bob Johnson Goes Full Reparations: Cut Black America A $14 Trillion Check Or Expect More Rebellions
Robert L. Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the RLJ Companies has just issued a statement on Black American reparations and a proposal.
Some may be surprised by the move. Johnson has been criticized in the past for not taking a more aggressive stance on issues that affect Black America.
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Sheriff Apologizes After Police Arrest Black Pastor Who Was Attacked by a White Family
A black pastor who was arrested after he called the police earlier this month to report an alleged attack by a white family received an apology from the sheriff, according to NBC News.
Pastor Leon McCray who lives in Woodstock, Virginia, was at his home on June 1 when he noticed two people trying to dump a refrigerator on his property. When McCray told them to stop, one of them started to verbally attack him while the other person went to get three other people.
McCray then said that all five of them proceeded to attack him verbally and physically. He said they were “threatening to kill me… telling me that my Black life didn’t matter,” he said. He then pulled out his concealed firearm to protect his life, he said. The group of people backed off and left and that’s when McCray proceeded to call 9-1-1 for help.
When the police officers arrived, although he placed the call, they didn’t ask McCray what happened. They spoke to the white family of five who had just attacked him, he said.
“I was not given an opportunity to speak,” said McCray, stating that the officers told him they had to arrest him for brandishing a gun. “And I said, what about the trespassing and the assault?”
Pastor McCray detailed the incident in this video he posted to his Facebook page.
Sheriff Timothy C. Carter announced via Facebook that the charges against McCray had been dropped and the white family, whose ages range from 26 to 57 years old, had been charged with various crimes, including assault, battery, and abduction. The family members were all arrested after Carter met with McCray on June 3.
“It was apparent to me that the charge of brandishing was certainly not appropriate. Actually, as I told Mr. McCray, if I were faced with similar circumstances, I would have probably done the same thing,” Carter said in a statement, referring to McCray pulling out his concealed weapon in self-defense.
“I have apologized to Mr. McCray, and I appreciate his patience as I have worked through these matters,” said Carter, adding that he placed two of his staff supervisors on unpaid administrative leave, “while I complete an administrative review of the initial incident.”
Pastor McCray announced that the charges haven’t been dropped as of yet according to a post on his Facebook page.
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3 questions with James H. Williams, Jr., professor of mechanical engineering
In two new textbooks, Professor of Mechanical Engineering James H. Williams, Jr. shares his engineering knowledge, joy, and teaching style that have inspired generations of MIT students as well as engineers and scientists worldwide. As a mechanical engineering professor, Williams is the first to receive the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the first to receive the Jacob P. Den Hartog Distinguished Educator Award, and the first to be named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He is also the first MIT professor to be named the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence.
The initial textbook, “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics,” is a lightly edited and rededicated publication of the celebrated original version from 1996. The second textbook is entitled “Wave Propagation—An Introduction to Engineering Analyses.” The books were published simultaneously, a decision that Williams attributes to the “brilliantly synergistic vision” of MIT Press Director Amy Brand. Autographed copies of both books have been sent to Dame Sally C. Davies, Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, for placement in the Wren Library.
Q: How would you describe the culture, style, and goals of these books?
A: The culture of both books is engineering mechanics, conventionally consisting of the terminology, disciplinary structure, and mathematics of hardcore engineering mechanics. But, the style of both books is conversant, unconventionally consisting of extended and repetitive presentations of the disciplinary structure, mathematics, and underlying physics. My primary goals are multiplex: They are derived from my certainty that MIT students want to be intellectually stimulated and challenged; they want to be educated and trained, and to know and respect the difference.
The technical writing and lecturing styles of the engineering science revolution of a few generations ago — indeed, of quantitative subjects in many disciplines — are characterized by disciplinary structure, expressed within a terse, nonrepeating presentation. This sparse style, when done well, accommodates some philosophical and publishing goals, but it is not ideal for most teaching. Repetition is one of the best techniques for reinforcing disciplinary and mathematical structure in the formulation and analysis of a subject; and structure is one of the best means of instilling confidence for approaching new problems.
In passing, the focus of these remarks is not classroom teaching, which is a more complex activity. I have attended lectures concerning classroom teaching and the lecturers invariably omitted the attribute that I consider to be the most important, though far from only, requisite for superlative classroom teaching: Namely, the teacher should be learned in the subject. Observing the disregard for this premise is not pretty. Incidentally, therefore, the possession of disciplinary knowledge is one of the reasons why there are so many excellent teachers at MIT.
In “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics,” which is the considerably broader of the two books, I begin with a major chapter on the history of dynamics, and I cite historical and technical bits throughout the book to enhance at-hand topics. The principles and techniques that are studied in this textbook were developed over several millennia. Students have encountered some of the iconic names in the disciplines that are cited, but often simply as adjectives of a scientific principle or concept as opposed to individuals who progressively contributed to science, engineering, or cosmology as they sought to locate our niche in the universe. Imhotep, Ptolemy, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Maxwell, Einstein, Hubble, and others were individuals, who made compelling scientific contributions, who sometimes stumbled at solving technical problems, and who devotedly chose struggle and potential failure over comfort and conformity.
Notably, at the beginning of the procession of those renowned contributors, humankind resided on a stationary Earth-centered universe, as all celestial bodies revolved in circular orbits around the Earth, with heaven just beyond the visible stars. Thus, no matter what difficulties or shortcomings human beings experienced, humankind could nevertheless surmise that we were the purpose of creation. But after those individuals had spoken, all of humanity lived on an insignificant planet, orbiting a middling star, in an ordinary galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies; and in such a world, heaven had been inconveniently moved to some unknown location.
“Wave Propagation—An Introduction to Engineering Analyses” is a smaller and more focused book that explores the ubiquitous phenomenon of wave propagation. Everything that every human being has ever seen arrived as a wave; everything that every human being has ever heard arrived as a wave. Thus, the last time that each of us fell in love, wave propagation was at the core of that experience. This book is simultaneously revelatory and challenging. Within its introductory goals and presentations, this book is also unique. And, the extended and repetitive style that I defined decades ago and demonstrated in “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics” is executed, perhaps near its pinnacle, in this book.
Q: What are the special features or unusual topics that you use to achieve your goals in these books?
A: During my career, either individually or collaborating with my former students, I have performed a broad collection of engineering projects. Those activities — including my dynamical and stress analyses of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier systems (such as the propulsion shafting connecting the turbines and propellers), Yankee paper dryers, and hydroelectric power generation structures built by Newport News Shipbuilding; governmental and multinational corporate consulting; and academic research — have provided enormous intellectual assets that have enriched my teaching and textbooks.
In “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics,” in addition to the historical and philosophical perspectives discussed earlier, the book deals with the dynamics and vibration of lumped-parameter and continuous mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical systems. The book also contains an extensive collection of examples and appendixes, some of which were written to address contemporary issues that were being debated in the professional literature. Numerous other examples were simply whimsical analyses, such as my calculation of the forces on a “little bird” that I observed running along the whirling multi-axis mobile structure in Porter Square, Cambridge.
In “Wave Propagation—An Introduction to Engineering Analyses,” the siting of vignettes throughout the book is a rare feature. These vignettes are two-to-three-page diverse discourses portraying achievements or phenomena that I find interesting. There is no philosophical focus of the vignette topics, but there is a commonality of the vignettes — namely, each vignette presents an example of wave propagation. The topics of the vignettes include (1) the birth of quantum mechanics, (2) the generation and detection of gravitational waves, (3) communication between marine mammals in the ocean, (4) nondestructive evaluation of advanced composite materials and structures, (5) toppling dominoes, and (6) falling Slinkys.
Examples throughout the book are generally denoted by a solid square. To assist in the multiple-level use of the book, toward the end of chapters, relatively advanced examples are marked by a solid diamond. Moreover, these relatively advanced examples are often elemental illustrations of even more complex research or consulting achievements. For example, these relatively advanced diamond-denoted examples give underlying versions of analyses that (1) Dr. Samson S. Lee and I developed to nondestructively determine residual strength and stiffness of composite laminates, adhesively bonded joints, and fiber-reinforced composite springs and (2) Dr. Raymond J. Nagem and I developed to nondestructively evaluate multicomponent composite structures in high-performance aircraft and to model the dynamic response of structural junctions in Earth-orbiting large space structures.
Q: Whose contributions and encouragement of your work would you like to acknowledge?
A: Authors of books regard acknowledgments, dedications, and bestowals very seriously, and so have I. The combined acknowledgments of the two books are six pages long, thus numerous individuals are cited, including several iconic engineering academicians. Even so, with especial gratitude for personal and professional encouragement, I acknowledge President L. Rafael Reif, Vice Chancellor and former Dean of Engineering Ian A. Waitz and former MechE Department Head Gang Chen.
I dedicated “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics” to Charles M. Vest, as follows: To the memory of the empathetic man — possessor of an engaging smile, a wise twinkle in his eyes, and the courage to act — Charles Marstiller Vest (MIT President, 1990–2004), who gratefully stated and wrote of his relationship with me as “a vehicle for new insights and learning” for him: Mens, Manus et Cor (Latin for “Mind, Hand and Heart”).
For “Wave Propagation—An Introduction to Engineering Analyses,” the dedication reads: To A. Neil (1964) and Jane Pappalardo, by measure of profound and indelible devotion and love, MIT Royalty.
Throughout my academic career, I have donated all of my publication royalties to MIT. That custom remains intact with these books. I believe that for several decades, MIT has led the academic world in educational outreach. Thus, in the “Wave Propagation” bestowal, with inspiration from former Dean of Engineering Ian A. Waitz, I am especially pleased to endorse MIT’s strategic philanthropy, as implemented in two highly regarded educational outreach enterprises.
For “Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics,” all the royalties are donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology via the James H. Williams, Jr. (1967) Fund.
For “Wave Propagation—An Introduction to Engineering Analyses,” all the royalties are donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in equal parts to (i) the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach Programs (Executive Director Eboney Hearn) and (ii) the MIT Summer Research Program (Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Education Blanche E. Staton) in the names of Professor James H. Williams, Jr. and Dr. Raymond J. Nagem, who joined a functioning team and stayed to the end.
No textbook acknowledgment could satisfy me without reflecting upon my students. I requested of them and they delivered to me an openness and deep intellectual curiosity of whence and why as often as their pragmatic goals of how — the more sophisticated the better. In a lecture of 80 to 120 students, they sought alliance and camaraderie with me, enhanced by their amusement that by the third week of each semester, I had memorized each of their names and thus during lecture called upon them accordingly. (On other occasions, in a recitation of 10 to 15 pupils, my students repeatedly distinguished themselves across course-wide exams.) Because I did not use scripted lecture notes, some of the most fascinating chalkboards became a collaboration between them and me. And, they expressed their gratefulness in amusing and sundry ways. During lectures they applauded analyses of impromptu problems that they created (and which we solved together) as well as illuminating explanations of unintuitive conclusions; some distributed chocolates on or near holidays; others hung banners of tribute at final exam sites; as alumni, over the years, many have continued to share enduring recollections and to express continuing appreciation, as they brought their parents, spouses, and children to meet me; and much more.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2020
White couple apologize for calling cops on man writing BLM on own home
A white San Francisco couple have apologized for accusing a Filipino man of defacing private property when he stenciled “Black Lives Matter” on a wall in chalk.
“The last 48 hours have taught me that my actions were those of someone who is not aware of the damage caused by being ignorant,” said Lisa Alexander, CEO of the skincare company LaFace, Complex reports.
In cellphone footage that has circulated the web, James Juanillo, who goes by Jamietoons on Twitter, can be seen confronted on the sidewalk by Alexander and her partner Robert Larkin. Both accuse him of breaking the law, dismissing his suggestion that the home could be his own, theGrio previously reported.
READ MORE: ‘Karen’ calls cops on San Francisco man who stenciled ‘Black Lives Matter’ on his own property
The incident was captured by Juanillo on his cell phone, showing the moment the couple lied by claiming to “know the person who does live here.”
Alexander even threatens to call the cops on Juanillo for vandalizing private property.
A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. “Karen” lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here. #blacklivesmatter pic.twitter.com/rOpHvKVwgP
— Jaimetoons (@jaimetoons) June 12, 2020
The police ultimately show up after the couple walk away, but because they recognize Juanillo and know him not to be a troublemaker, the officers don’t even bother getting out of their car over the complaint.
“What she did is polite racism,” Juanillo said in an interview with ABC7 News. “It’s respectable racism. ‘Respectfully, sir, I don’t think you belong here.'”
After Internet sleuths uncovered the identity of the couple and dragged them for filth, the subscription service Birchbox severed ties with Alexander’s company. Larkin was fired on Monday by his employer, wealth management firm Raymond James, because his actions “were inconsistent with our valus,” the company said in a statement shared on Twitter.
— Raymond James (@RaymondJames) June 15, 2020
On Sunday, Alexander released a statement in which she apologized to Juanillo and noted that “When I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did. It was disrespectful to Mr. Juanillo and I am deeply sorry for that.”
Read her full statement via the Twitter post below.
#BlackLivesMatter | Lisa Alexander says she wants to apologize directly to Mr. Juanillo: ⬇️
“The last 48 hours have taught me that my actions were those of someone who is not aware of the damage caused by being ignorant”
Story:https://t.co/Wnxpe4CSpC@abc7newsbayarea pic.twitter.com/rhtjbVvJ7R
— Luz Peña (@LuzPenaABC7) June 14, 2020
Larkin also issued an apology and called out his “own personal blind spots.”
“Over the last two days, I have had my eyes opened wide to my own ignorance of racial inequity, and I have thought a lot about my own personal blind spots,” he said. “I was wrong to question Mr. Juanillo, and I was wrong to call the neighborhood police watch. It was wrong, and I am profoundly sorry for treating him with disrespect.”
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Study sheds light on a classic visual illusion
It’s a classic visual illusion: Two gray dots appear on a background that consists of a gradient from light gray to black. Although the two dots are identical, they appear very different based on where they are placed against the background.
Scientists who study the brain have been trying to figure out the mechanism behind this illusion, known as simultaneous brightness contrast, for more than 100 years. An MIT-led study now suggests that this phenomenon relies on brightness estimation that takes place before visual information reaches the brain’s visual cortex, possibly within the retina.
“All of our experiments point to the conclusion that this is a low-level phenomenon,” says Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “The results help answer the question of what is the mechanism that underlies this very fundamental process of brightness estimation, which is a building block of many other kinds of visual analyses.”
As one part of their investigation, the researchers studied blind children in India and found that they were susceptible to this illusion almost immediately after their sight was initiated after surgery, offering further evidence that brightness estimations are likely based on simple neural circuitry that doesn’t require any prior visual experience to be set up.
Sinha is the senior author of the study, which appears in the August issue of Vision Research. Other authors of the paper are Sarah Crucilla, who worked with Sinha while she was in high school and is now a Caltech undergraduate; Tapan Gandhi, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology and a former postdoc at MIT; Dylan Rose, a recent Northeastern University PhD recipient; Amy Singh of Google, who is also a former MIT postdoc; Suma Ganesh and Umang Mathur of Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi; and Peter Bex, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.
Estimating brightness
When we look at an image, our brain perceives a certain brightness at each location of the image. Surprisingly, however, our brightness percepts are not always proportional to the amount of light emanating from image regions, Sinha says. Instead, our perception is the product of the object’s actual color and the amount of light that is shining on it.
“You could have a really dark piece of cloth under a bright spotlight, and the amount of light that you get from it could be the same as, or even more than, the amount of light from a white piece of paper under dim light,” Sinha says. “The brain is presented with the challenge of figuring out how light or dark a surface is based on just the amount of energy it's receiving. In essence, the brain has to figure out the two numbers that were multiplied (illumination level and surface darkness) to produce the one number it is receiving (incoming energy) — a seemingly impossible task since infinitely many pairs of numbers can all yield the same product.”
Some scientists, including the 19th century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, an early pioneer of vision studies, suggested that estimating brightness is a “high-level” process. That is, the brain estimates brightness based on a high-level understanding of the lighting conditions, shapes, and shadows in the environment that it’s seeing.
Many visual tasks, such as identifying faces or objects, do rely on our previous experiences or expectations about what we’re seeing. However, the experiments that Sinha and his colleagues performed in this study suggest that in the case of brightness estimation, high-level processing does not play a significant role.
In their first set of experiments, the researchers created an image of a cube that appeared to be lit from the side, with one face appearing a little brighter than the other. In reality, using a clever trick that Chinese ceramic painters knew over 800 years ago, the face that looked brighter actually had lower luminance than the face that looked darker. In this display, the researchers found that when identical gray dots were placed on the two cube faces, the dot that was on the face that seemed to be in shadow actually appeared darker than an identical dot placed on a face that was receiving more light.
“This is the opposite of what happens in standard simultaneous contrast displays, in which a dot on a dark background appears brighter than a dot on a light background,” Sinha says. “This result runs counter to the idea that high-level analysis of lighting conditions contributes to brightness estimation.”
The second set of experiments was designed to localize the processes of brightness estimation. It built on the curious fact that the unified view of the world we experience, constructed by merging images from the two eyes, is accompanied by an almost complete loss of “eye of origin” information. We do not know what the original images were, and which eye they came from; we are only aware of the merged view (sometimes called the “cyclopean” image, after the one-eyed monster Cyclops of Greek mythology). However, using specially designed images and stereo glasses, the researchers found that brightness estimation did not need to wait until information from the two eyes was merged; it had already occurred by that point.
This finding suggests that brightness estimation occurs very early, before information coming from each eye is combined into one visual stream. The combination occurs in a part of the brain’s cortex called V1 (so named because it represents the first stage of visual processing in the cortex). This places a tight constraint on the location of processing; the researchers hypothesize that significant brightness computation most likely takes place in the retina.
“The implication of results from the first two sets of studies was that if brightness estimation is really a low-level process, and the circuitry is located as early as the retina, then perhaps this is an innate dispensation,” Sinha says. “This is something that the visual system comes prepared to do, right from birth.”
“An innate mechanism”
The researchers were able to explore this hypothesis by studying blind children who had recently had their sight restored. Sinha runs an effort in India called Project Prakash, whose mission is to treat children suffering from preventable forms of blindness such as congenital cataracts. Many of the treated children go on to participate in scientific studies of visual development, although treatment is not contingent on such participation.
“The prediction was that if brightness estimation is truly an innate mechanism, then right after sight is initiated in children who were congenitally blind, they should fall prey to the simultaneous contrast illusion,” Sinha says.
That is exactly what the researchers found, in a study of nine children who had cataracts surgically removed between the ages of 8 and 17. All of the children were susceptible to the illusion, in tests done just 24 to 48 hours after their surgical bandages were removed.
In a 2015 study, Sinha showed that recently sighted children are also immediately susceptible to two other visual illusions, known as the Müller-Lyer and Ponzo illusions, which involve judging the length of lines based on visual cues.
“The account that emerged from that work also seems to be consistent with the account that's emerging from the brightness studies. That is, many of the phenomena that we are so quick to ascribe to high level inferential processes may actually be instantiated in some very simple circuit mechanisms of the brain that are innately available,” Sinha says. “These results are contributing to the quest for understanding how our nervous systems solve the complex challenge of perceiving and understanding the world around us.”
The research was funded by the National Eye Institute/National Institutes of Health, the Nick Simons Family Foundation, the Sikand Foundation, and the Halis Family Foundation.
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Akon secures $6B construction contract for AKON CITY in Senegal
Akon has secured a $6 billion construction contract to build his own solar powered, futuristic city in Senegal.
The singer/songwriter/entrepreneur is developing a cryptocurrency themed city in the country, on a 2,000-acre plot of land gifted to him by President Macky Sall, theGrio previously reported. Although he was born in St. Louis, Akon spent much of his childhood in Senegal, and considers it his hometown.
In an Instagram post on Monday, Akon shared a photo announcing that the $6 billion dollar deal was finalized.
“Just finalized the agreement for AKON CITY in Senegal. Looking forward to hosting you there in the future,” he posted.
Akon’s ambitious project is made possible through his partnership with consulting firm KE International, which was awarded the $6 billion contract to build Akon City.
READ MORE: Akon signs memorandum agreement to finalize plans to build AKON CITY in Senegal
The first phase of Akon City is expected to be complete by the end of 2023. At which time the city will boast roads, a Hamptons Hospital campus, Hamptons Mall, a police station, a waste facility, a school, and a power plant, per Complex. Phase 2 will see the roll out and integration of Akon’s AKOIN cryptocurrency.
Akon sat down with Nick Cannon in December to discuss his city in more detail. He said AKoin will be fully functional over the next decade.
The initiative is aligned with Akon’s Lighting Africa Initiate, which aims to bring electricity to Africa through solar power.
“It’s all renewable, the Akon-tainment solar city. It’s all renewable,” the “Locked Up” singer told Cannon, according to an earlier article in theGrio. “(It’s) A real physical place, it’s going to have a real airport. It’s a 10-year building block so we’re doing it in stages. We started construction in March and stage two is going to be in 2025.”
Phase 2, which is expect to wrap by 2029, will reportedly include all the amenities a city needs, including parks, a stadium, universities, and an industrial complex.
President Sall plans to encourage development in the area by offering special tax-breaks.
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BLM protester punched in front of police, no arrests made
A lone white man demonstrating for the Black Lives Matter Movement in Bethal, Ohio on Sunday is taking legal action against a counter-protester who punched him in the back of his head.
The disturbing moment was caught on camera, and occurred in front of a police officer standing a few feet away, TMZ reports. The cop barely flinches because the handful of officers on the scene were in “no arrest mode” as they worked crowd control, a rep for the Bethel Police Department told the outlet.
“Sir, I just got punched in the back of the head,” the protester tells one of the officers who witnessed the crime, per BuzzFeed News. The cop doesn’t bother with detaining the man who assaulted him. Instead, he informs the victim that “We can take a report from you.”
READ MORE: South Carolina school employee fired after saying protesters should ‘go back to Africa’
According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the unidentified man initially decided not to press charges, but changed his mind Monday and an arrest warrant was issued for the suspect.
This is Bethel, Ohio
BLM protestors tried to stand their ground, but were pushed back and assaulted by the racist trash there.
In this particular video, a man stands alone against the crowds, and is punched in the back of the head, and the cops don't do anything about it. pic.twitter.com/3XayGtmhBw
— 🐿Sharpie | 1312🐿 (@whiskeyrodent) June 15, 2020
A local group called Bethel’s Solidarity with Black Lives Demonstration initially planned a peaceful protest on Sunday, expecting about 100 people. The event turned chaotic, however, when more than 250 motorcycles blocked the path of demonstrators.
WARNING: The following video contains explicit language.
#BLM Bethel, Ohio peaceful protesters attacked by angry mob**2nd Edit: no arrests were made. Investigations are…
Posted by Abbi Remers on Sunday, June 14, 2020
Video shared on social media shows people clashing with bikers and counter-protesters snatching signs from #BLM demonstrators.
More from Bethel, OH. My niece getting pummeled by bikers and local shitters. pic.twitter.com/ZSwHZvRhUn
— Chanandler Bong (@haynus3rectus) June 15, 2020
Several clips of the protest also how angry white males wearing camouflage gear and carrying rifles and the American flag. Several witnesses say their were warned by these men to flee the scene or face dangerous consequences.
“I am completely against behavior that is illegal or infringes on any American’s constitutional rights. Some of the law-breaking behavior that we have seen over the last couple of days is appalling and disgusting and does not reflect the values of our community,” said Bethel Mayor Jay Noble.
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T.I. joins calls for Georgia officer to be fired after holding 5 teens at gunpoint
As if there weren’t already enough issues around policing around the country and in Georgia this week, more police officers have been recorded treating unarmed African American males as a threat.
READ MORE: Black sheriff says that Rayshard Brooks’ shooting was justified
In this case, the victims of racial profiling were teenagers. Video circulated on social media today of white officers in Clayton County, Georgia drawing their guns on a group of teenagers.
This was in response to a 911 call where a store owner in the area called police saying the teens were trying to steal from the store and that one of the teens was waving a gun.
According to 11 Alive, the teens were shadowboxing near a convenience store in their neighborhood and then used a local short cut. Somehow or another, as the video begins in the middle of the confrontation, as the teens are standing on the grass with their hands on their heads, more than one officer has his gun trained on them.
This is what you see in the video.
As bystanders question why the officers have guns out, one answers, “I’m being safe.” You can hear others asking the officers not to shoot and the officer says, “Nobody got disrespected, nobody got hurt.”
But Clayton County police released 17 minutes of the altercation, in which an officer asks the teens not to move and hold their hands up. He also asks why the store owner thinks that one of the teens had a gun. As a crowd forms, the officer calls for backup asking the teens to ignore the gathering crowd and pay attention to his commands so that no one gets hurt.
In a statement, Clayton County police and their chief Kevin Roberts explained the reason for the stop.
“Due to the allegation that the juveniles were in possession of a gun, the officer approached them with his duty weapon drawn and pointed at the juveniles. The officer lowered the weapon once the juveniles complied with the officer’s verbal commands to stop and show their hands.”
The teens were frisked and were unarmed. After viewing the store’s surveillance tape, police say they did see what looked like a gun. The teens admitted to an officer that it was a BB gun they had thrown away in the bushes that police say looked like a real gun.
According to police, the teens were then told that playing with a gun that looked so realistic could be dangerous.
You can see the entire video via the police officer’s body cam below:
At a press conference today, one of the teens and his mother was joined by rapper Clifford “T.I.” Harris, who spoke on behalf of them and their families.
“Why don’t we ever see little white kids being held a gunpoint? Period. The constitution was written for all Americans except it seems like you only have to be a certain shade or a certain color to reap the benefits of it,” T.I. said.
“Why are only people of color, young Black boys, young Black girls being gunned down at the hands of policemen and suing excuses like BB guns, water guns,” the rapper, who was born and resides in Atlanta, asked. “There are little white boys that real rifles that go hunting every day, every week with their grandparents and parents. They aren’t being held at gunpoint. Let’s not mix words and understand what we dealing with here.”
READ MORE: Atlanta cop who shot Rayshard Brooks had twelve prior misconduct complaints
Shanelle Williams is the bystander who recorded the video and put in on her Facebook page. She asked the police to be held accountable.
“We’re saying, we would like to see revisions. And not just your revisions. We want you to give your community an opportunity to say, ‘this is how we want you to police us.’ I think that is the only thing that they can do as of right now.
“What would have happened if the community didn’t show up and show out for them that day? … if one of those kids made the wrong move, what would have happened?” she asked.
One of the teens involved in the incident is 13. T.I. and the teen’s mother said he has been traumatized.
“I thought I was going to die,” the teen, only identified as Kamari, said. “I’ve seen all these Black kids just dying and to have myself in that, it was just crazy.”
A protest is planned for Wednesday.
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