A New Jersey man didn’t trust police but sought their help anyway. Two days later, he was dead

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 180 points –
A New Jersey man didn’t trust police but sought their help anyway. Two days later, he was dead
whyy.org
9

If you're black and you are mentally ill, pray, dance, sacrifice a goat, whatever your god or gods demand to avoid having a breakdown, because if you have a breakdown and someone calls the cops, you're dead.

If I was a black man in the US, dancing around a sacrificed goat probably would not be on the list of things I'd be doing to avoid encountering the police.

I'm an atheist, so I don't think any of it should be done. It was more about what they should really hope never happens to them.

As Lowery sounded off, police stood back and summoned an ambulance to take the 27-year-old Black man to the hospital. What happened in the ambulance remains a flashpoint in the Black community’s deteriorating relationship with the city’s 400-plus-member police department, an agency so troubled and distrusted that state officials last year took it over.

Adding the "final straw" reason state officials took it over ...

New Jersey’s attorney general said Monday that his office has taken control of the police department in the state’s third-largest city, Paterson, less than a month after officers there fatally shot a well-known crisis intervention worker during a tense standoff.

Minorities, including black people, continue to be dehumanized by "authorities". I want to see the day when we stop hearing about senseless, preventable deaths.

Here’s hoping we both live long enough lives to see that day

The odds are not good. Well, unless communication totally breaks down. Then we'll technically have met the criteria.

One of 17 children, he was raised by his mother and stepfather in a series of crowded houses in Paterson’s Fourth Ward.

Holy shit. Stop having children. Use contraceptives or stop fucking. No one is able to properly raise this many children.

(In no way am I ascribing his death / murder to too many siblings. It just jumped out at me as fucking nuts that anyone would keep fucking like this without taking measures to stop creating dependents.)