Miami police abuse documented
2013-11-22 00:57:46.428557+00 by
Dan Lyke
2 comments
Miami police harassing people in a store in a low-income area, to the point where they've arrested a clerk who works there for "trespassing" at that store 62 times:
So how can he be trespassing when he works there?
It’s a question the store’s owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.
The great thing about the surveillance society is that Mr. Saleh has installed cameras to document these abuses and gone to the press.
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#Comment Re: made: 2013-11-22 12:25:33.45082+00 by:
meuon
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I know this kind of neighborhood and store well.. was one on the corner of E. Main and Central, and a few more down farther on E. Main street. The kind of places the hookers would buy a beer and a cigarette (not a pack..) and rolling papers. Roses in glass tubes (crack pipe kits) and cheap cigars (blunts).
People also buy Milk, Eggs, Bread.. etc..
That being said: The police are not behaving well and it seems that even if there is another side of the story, they are in the wrong. Worse, these actions probably are making things in the neighborhood worse, not better.
#Comment Re: made: 2013-11-22 16:12:57.911455+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Yeah, the fact that the neighborhood store is apparently part of a community and is getting this sort of treatment reinforces in the minds of the members of that community that the police are just another gang, and their colors happen to be blue.
Which means that when the members of that community need enforcement of the norms of that community, they're going to turn to their own armed groups, not the external ones.
The difference between the police and the gangs is that the police have rules. When the police violate those rules then the difference is that one group is a part of the community and the other isn't.