At the Nation, Mychal Denzel Smith says that a viral video of white Philadelphia police officers harassing black pedestrians highlights the inherent problems in stop and frisk and underscores a larger problem in America — racism.
This video was recorded on September 27 and uploaded to YouTube a few days later. It has recently made the rounds on social media and caught the attention of major news outlets. In it, two Philadelphia police officers stop, detain briefly and question two young black men who are walking down the street. The reason given for the stop is that one of the young men said "Hi" to a drug dealer…
There are a number of choice quotes to be pulled from this video, my favorite among them the retort from the young man being stopped and who managed to film the incident, "You not protecting me by stopping me when I'm trying to go to work," but it's this exchange that has come to define the encounter:
Officer: "We don't want you here [in Philadelphia], anyway. All you do is weaken the fucking country."
Young man: "How do I weaken the country? By working?"
Officer: "No, freeloading,"
Young man: "Freeloading on what? I work."
Officer: "Do you? Where?"
Young man: "[redacted] Country Club."
Officer: "Doing what?"
Young man: "I'm a server"
Officer: "A server? Serving weed?"
The officer responsible for this racist line of questioning, Philip Nace, was recently placed in the Differential Police Response Unit, a disciplinary unit, for what a police spokesman called "idiotic behavior" after another video surfaced of him knocking down a basketball hoop and, while driving away in a police van, telling the group that was playing "have a good day." He is being investigated by Internal Affairs.
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Read Mychal Denzel Smith's entire piece at the Nation.
The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.
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