Public Enemy #1

20 years ago today Rodney King was videotaped being brutally assaulted by officers of the LAPD. CNN will be doing a special about the entire affair from the beating, the LA riots and the overhaul of the Los Angeles police department Rodney King, 20 years later.Now has anything really changed? We still have stories like Oscar Grant in 2009, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a police officer while he was handcuffed and laying on his stomach Man's Fatal Shooting by San Francisco Subway Police.You have Sean Bell who was murdered in a hail of 50 bullets on his wedding day. The name are familiar to most.Amadou Diallo, February 1999, street trader from Guinea, shot 19 times when white NYPD officers mistook his wallet for a gun and fired 41 bullets. Four officers acquitted.Patrick Dorismond, March 2000, unarmed 26-year-old Haitian security guard, killed by NYPD officer Anthony Vasquez in bungled drugs sting. Dorismond reacted angrily when undercover detective asked him for crack cocaine and was shot in struggle.

These are some of the more well known instances, but what about Orlando Barlow Killed in 2003
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Apr-22-Thu-2004/news/23712343.html
or even Deandre Brunston killed in a hail of 81 bullets while holding a flip flop,Police footage of the incident or Timothy Thomas, April 2001 Unarmed black 19-year-old, shot by a white officer, Stephen Roach, in Cincinnati. Thomas wanted for traffic violations .Eventually Officer Roach was acquitted. Eight hundred arrests were made in ensuing riots. What is the main theme in all of this? Police are rarely if ever convicted of crimes, but rather civil rights abuses.What is damaging to my confidence in the police as a black man, is they have been murdering us and getting away with it. Then being charged with civil rights violations.This is in no way a condemnation of the police as a whole, but rather a condemnation of the system that would allow this modern day lynching to continue unabated. I don't believe in rioting and destroying the neighborhood where you live. That is just ignorant . I don't believe in protest without purpose either, that is just an empty gesture .To change the system, you have to change the laws and to do that you have to change the people who make the laws.

After 9/11 Muslims were considered the Enemy . Stereotypes of Muslims were running wild.Anti Muslim rhetoric was and still is the norm, Mosques were being set on fire,muslims of all colors and Ethnicities were being attacked and labeled terrorists. The anti muslim movement was at a fever pitch, it still is to some extent . The one thing that never changed ,even though the country was united after the senseless murder of US citizens, was the fact that the black man was and is still Public Enemy #1. Rodney King is still here,no longer speeding in his Hyundai.He is a former reality star on VH1, remarried to a juror in his civil case. He will be remembered for the beating and also uttering the infamous words "Can we all just get along"in response to LA riots.Well Rodney I wish we could, but it seems like some of those that wear the color blue have a problem with the color black.