Black Women Share Their 'Degrading' Encounters With Police
From excessive use of force to unwarranted -- and often sexual -- searches, black women are no exception from the ongoing encounters of police brutality.
In a new video produced by Fusion, two black women detail their experiences with police violence and explain how these instances -- which involve them or other black women they know -- have ended in either extreme discomfort or, far worse, death.
The clip shows 25-year-old Crystal Pope describing the details of one spring evening in 2012. On that night, Pope says, she and her friends were sitting on a park bench when police abruptly approached them. Pope claims officers were looking for a male rapist.
Pope and her friends had no connection to the case or any involvement in the investigation and yet, she said the officers asked for their identification and promptly proceeded to aggressively pat them down.
Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.
“It was overwhelming,” Pope says in the video. “It was degrading.”
She recalled the same painful memory when I interviewed Pope in 2013. She told me that she was talking with her friends by the park near her home in Harlem when two male cops pulled up alongside the park bench. She said they were confused by the officers’ motives. Still, the cops acted on their own volition.
“They patted us down and ran their hands through my front and back pockets,” she told me. “They patted around my waistline and butt. They were so aggressive.”
Pope’s story is similar to thousands of other black women who claim to have been racially profiled and physically violated by police. In frequent and extremely tragic instances, many of these individuals are part of the growing toll of black individuals killed by cops. U.S. police are on track to kill 1,100 people this year alone, with African Americans twice as likely to die, The Guardian reports. This was the outcome for 23-year-old Shantel Davis who was shot and killed by an NYPD officer in 2012. Her story is detailed in the video above, and includes her mother who recently commemorated the three-year-anniversary of her daughter’s death.
There is, however, hope for change, with videos like these, campaigns like #SayHerName and continuous coverage and conversations around the issues of black women and police brutality.
Until then, keep watching, listening to and reading these stories –- because they are crucial narratives from black women that should no longer be ignored.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
