They Say F the Police...Fatal Raid

I'm not one to bash the police on a regular basis.  I try as much as I can to respect the officers who patrol the streets looking to protect and serve.  But most members of "minority" and low-income neighborhoods have a seemingly innate dysfunctional relationship with local authorities.  Those on the outside try to find fault with us.  They say that because we are deviant criminals, guilty of conspiring to do evil at a moment's notice, we hate the very agents who seek to keep the streets safe and free from criminals.

The history of what some would call terrorism is one of the main reasons that minority and lower income neighborhoods scream out things like "F the police".

Today we mourn the death of Aiyana Jones, a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, fatally shot, WHILE SLEEP.  BY POLICE.  Yes. While sleeping.

The story according to the Associated Press, was that Aiyana was asleep on the couch in the living room when the police raided the house looking for a suspect in the shooting of a 17-year-old.  Upon breaking in there may or may not have been a struggle with a 46 year old woman (the girl's grandmother) that led to the firing of one shot that hit Aiyana in the neck and killed her.  The details (as usual) are sketchy but the fact remains that one shot was fired and it killed this poor, innocent young girl.  FULL STORY on CNN

And here we are faced with yet another situation where negligent actions by law enforcement officers led to the death of an unarmed civilian, this time, a little girl.

This rarely (if ever) happens in suburban towns to affluent or upper middle-class white or Asian families.   This type of stuff almost exclusively happens in Black and Latino neighborhoods that are poor.  Now there are a number of perspectives, if there wasn't a murder suspect in the vicinity cops wouldn't have the need to raid a house.  If the neighborhood let go of the nationwide mantra of "no snitching" the raid would've been unnecessary.  Violence begets violence, so if there wasn't a suspect to begin with, who shot a seventeen year old, then this seven-year-old girl would not have been shot.  I can understand the logic. I can understand the frustration that could precipitate such a response from others.

Here's the flip side: I find it hard to believe that police are trained to shoot first in a raid.  I find it hard believe that there was a good reason that the lead officer shot one round because he was in a tussle with a grandmother.  I find it harder to believe that the officer mistakenly hit the person who was sleeping on the couch...after all what better place to allow someone to sleep who's a fugitive than your couch?

No matter the reasons, the little girl is dead, the officer is on paid administrative leave, and the tension between black/brown people and the police continues to ebb...