Police using the image of a young smiling black boy as target practice. The first response is, “that can’t happen here, we live in America where Dr. King marched 50 years ago to end that sort of thing.” We convince ourselves that there is no “pattern” of police misconduct and that any confrontation is sensationalized by the media. We spout statistics like less than 1% of arrests result in misconduct claims and 1/3 of black men commit arrestable offenses in an attempt to assuage our feelings that something may be wrong. What makes this image bear so heavy on my mind is not that “this can’t happen here,” but that this did happen here. This past January, it was discovered that the North Miami Police Department were literally using the images of black men for target practice. What kind of mindset does that create? Are all black men merely walking targets? How can this image, created before the North Miami PD story broke, tell more truth than the police themselves?
