My Mexican American Husband was Nearly Shot by a Cop

He had just gotten off of work. He was tired and waiting for a bus. He was in his thirties.

He saw the cruiser pass by slowly with a black cop driving and a white cop as the passenger. He thought nothing of it. After all, he lived in Los Angeles and it wasn’t unusual to see cops slow down.

Then, the car approached again, only this time it looked like it would slow down and stop. He was ready. It wasn’t the first time he had been stopped for being Mexican.

Sure enough, the white rookie cop leaped out of the cruiser and dashed up on my husband. The senior cop, the black one, remained in the car. For you to properly understand the scenario, I must tell you that my husband doesn’t have one tattoo. He doesn’t dress like a gang member. He is a rather average looking guy who at the time had dark brown hair, a goatee and nothing much remarkable about him…except he is a rather attractive man. He was working at a nursing home at the time, as a janitor. So he wasn’t dressed in a hoodie or flashy or much of anything else.

Upon seeing the cop run up on him, he shoved his hands in the air to surrender for whatever they thought he had done. The white cop ordered him to put his hands near his waist. He thought that was an odd command, but he slowly began to comply. And that’s when it happened.

The white cop screamed out, “He’s got a gun!”

He had nothing of the sort. And nothing in his hands. He shot his hands back up into the air again and the black cop jumped out of the car and ran up to back his partner, guns drawn. However, with experience, fortunately he stopped when my husband screamed, “I don’t have a gun! Search me!”

The white cop was nervous and screaming, “He’s got one, I saw it.”

That day, after they had done a thorough search and discovered my husband had nothing in his backpack or on his person, nor anywhere around the bus stop, they let him go. As they released him, they told him not to tell anyone what happened. Once he was safely away, he reported them.

The moral of this event is:

You CAN lose your life, even when you are complying with police orders.

You CAN be targeted by cops for no reason what-so-ever.

You CAN be targeted simply for being Mexican or black or Native American or whatever.

And some cops DO feel justified in taking your life without a justified reason.

Does this mean all cops are murderous bastards? No. We’ve met plenty that were decent people simply trying to earn a living. And many cops are people of color who feel just as sickened by the phenomenon of these deaths as the rest of us.

Are there reasons some cops are prone to use deadly force without provocation? Yes!

In the following article, we see one explanation.

[embed]FBI's warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement nearly forgotten Because of intensifying civil strife over the recent killings of unarmed black men and boys, many Americans are…thegrio.com

Could this be one reason for what appears to be an upsurge in the deaths of people of color? Absolutely!

But my question is this…why haven’t the news agencies dedicated any time towards investigating this? Could it be we may find the answers that we don’t want to acknowledge?