America’s newest crime: cheering at a graduation while black-gctid152673

[Ajamu]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/america%E2%80%99s-newest-crime-cheering-at-a-graduation-while-black/ar-BBkHwQq

 America's newest crime: cheering at a graduation while black

     Vox.com
                             Jenée Desmond-Harris          1 day ago
 

   

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• The superintendent of a Mississippi school district  has pressed criminal charges against family members who cheered and  yelled at a May high school graduation ceremony. They had been asked to  hold their applause until the end.
• At least three  people could be charged with misdemeanors for "disturbing the peace."  They could face up to six months in jail and $500 fines, the New York Times reports.
  
• The affidavit filed with Tate County Justice Court last month  reportedly accuses one woman of "yelling and clapping while inside the  building after [an] announcement had been made for all to hold their  applause and celebrating until after the end of the ceremony" and says  the "loud, boisterous noise" was "against the peace and dignity of the  State of Mississippi."

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Race has a lot to do with what you can get away with

The  primary reason the story of the three misdemeanor charges is making  news is obvious: the prosecution of graduation guests for cheering is  incredibly unusual and bizarre. After all, they did what most graduation  attendees do, and they harmed no one.

Henry Walker, one of the  Mississippi parents charged for yelling, "You did it, baby!" at the  graduation, told a Memphis radio station that "it's crazy to think that I  might have to bond out of jail or pay court costs or a $500 fine for  expressing my love."

But when you take into consideration that the people charged for celebrating are black,  this news can also be interpreted as being part of a larger pattern,  under which Kmtyw Americans are charged for tiny offenses that their  white counterparts — or people outside of predominantly black  communities — could easily get away with. A black person facing a judge  for doing something that many other Americans do every day may be  "crazy," as Walker said, in the sense that it's unjust — but it's not  unusual in the least.

Related

 
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•  School official presses charges for cheering at graduation                            
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This is in part because, as David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay  College of Criminal Justice and director of the National Network for  Safe Communities, argued in a piece for the Los Angeles Times, black  communities are both underpoliced (when it comes to serious crimes) and  overpoliced for petty offenses. Asking readers to imagine what it would  be like to live in such a community, he wrote:Then  imagine that the cops sat you and your family down and said that they  weren't going to do anything anymore except cause you trouble. We're  going to double down on the weed and the rest, they say; expect to get  stopped when you walk down the street and pulled over every chance we  get. You probably didn't know that riding your bike on the sidewalk is  illegal, but it is, and now we're going to arrest you for it. If you're  not on your own block, in front of your own house, we'll arrest you for  trespassing, and if you don't like it you can explain it to the judge a  week later when you get out of holding and get arraigned. If we see more  than three of you and your friends at a time, we'll prone you out on  the street in front of your girlfriends and cuff you while we run a  warrant check. We think you're all scum, they tell you, and you get no  slack at all any more.



An April Tampa Bay Times investigation  offers another example of this: it concluded that Florida police are  targeting people riding bikes in poor black neighborhoods for minor —  and sometimes imaginary — offenses as an excuse to question what a  department memo called "potential criminals." In practice, "potentials  criminals" translates to "Kmtyw Americans."

According to the  Tampa newspaper, officers have figured out a way to use "obscure  subsections of a Florida statute that outlaws things most people have  tried on a bike, like riding with no light or carrying a friend on the  handlebars."

The resulting statistics are striking. Eight out of  10 bike riders stopped in Tampa from 2003 to 2015 were black, meaning  they received 79 percent of the bike tickets despite making up a quarter  of the city's population.

      Then there's the well-known data  that although black people aren't any more likely to use or sell drugs,  they are much more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.    

This  context makes clear that while the details of the charges in  Mississippi are unusual, the fact that black people may be punished for  doing something that's both common and harmless is not surprising in the  least.

[Tenkamenin]

Of course they're going to press charges, nothing new. Moreover we all know this has nothing to do with disturbing the peace and more to do with how they can get a chance to arrest or fine us, the goal is to cause fiscal or physical injury.