There's a depressingly cynical part of me that wonders whether police thought that as minority shopowners, the proprietors were probably supportive of the protests, so they deserved what happened to their stores.
It's the same where I live. Crime is rampant in the lower income communities of color I used to live in, while where I live now is virtually crime-free. When I called the cops before, they never came. Never. For example, the obviously out-of-his-head-on-something guy who took off all his clothes in broad daylight in front of my house, and started trying to climb the 8' iron fence between the street and my courtyard. My dogs were barking their heads off (rather menacingly) and I told him to stop over and over, but he kept trying to climb and falling down even after I turned the hose on him in desperation. This went on for 30 minutes. Innumerable 911 calls later, I finally told the dispatcher I didn't want to shoot the crazy guy, but I couldn't let him on my courtyard. If the cops weren't coming, I said, I wanted to be on the record as having tried everything before resorting to lethal force. She told me to go ahead and shoot him. Luckily for me, the crazy guy's system ran out of whatever it was juicing him up, and he wandered off, naked, down the street, never to be seen again.
Contrast that charming vignette with my daughter's call to 911 in my new neighborhood, informing them her mom "was being mean to her," which was answered by two of the city's finest within 3 minutes, whereupon I was questioned about this reported "domestic violence incident" for nearly an hour.
This is the way of the world--until we make it different.
There's a depressingly cynical part of me that wonders whether police thought that as minority shopowners, the proprietors were probably supportive of the protests, so they deserved what happened to their stores.
Depressing indeed. Cynical? Maybe not.
It's the same where I live. Crime is rampant in the lower income communities of color I used to live in, while where I live now is virtually crime-free. When I called the cops before, they never came. Never. For example, the obviously out-of-his-head-on-something guy who took off all his clothes in broad daylight in front of my house, and started trying to climb the 8' iron fence between the street and my courtyard. My dogs were barking their heads off (rather menacingly) and I told him to stop over and over, but he kept trying to climb and falling down even after I turned the hose on him in desperation. This went on for 30 minutes. Innumerable 911 calls later, I finally told the dispatcher I didn't want to shoot the crazy guy, but I couldn't let him on my courtyard. If the cops weren't coming, I said, I wanted to be on the record as having tried everything before resorting to lethal force. She told me to go ahead and shoot him. Luckily for me, the crazy guy's system ran out of whatever it was juicing him up, and he wandered off, naked, down the street, never to be seen again.
Contrast that charming vignette with my daughter's call to 911 in my new neighborhood, informing them her mom "was being mean to her," which was answered by two of the city's finest within 3 minutes, whereupon I was questioned about this reported "domestic violence incident" for nearly an hour.
This is the way of the world--until we make it different.