Author: Daniel Victor / Source: New York Times
What makes the police encounters chilling is how routine they are.
They’re sparked by black people going about their everyday lives, only to be interrupted by someone calling the police for the thinnest of suspicions.
In the past month, more than a handful of such interactions have attracted widespread attention on social media — and, in turn, in national outlets like The Times, CNN and The Washington Post.
“It happens so frequently to people of color that we don’t often think of it as a big deal or as particularly newsworthy,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown University law professor who is the author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.”
He added, “It’s humiliating and aggravating and upsetting, but the idea that it’s national news is unexpected.”
It’s also encouraging, he said. Half of the African-Americans surveyed last year by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said they had personally experienced racial discrimination in police interactions.
But until recently, the cellphone videos of these everyday interactions weren’t constantly going viral, and the news stories were far less common. Now routine police interactions, those that don’t end in an arrest or violence but still leave people shaken, are entering national consciousness in a way they have not in the past.
Here are six instances in just the past month that have exploded on social media and made national headlines, and what the people were doing when the police were called.
Lolade Siyonbola, a graduate student in African studies at Yale, fell asleep while working on a “marathon of papers” Monday night. At 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, a woman who lived in the dorm turned on the lights and called the Yale police, telling Ms. Siyonbola she wasn’t allowed to sleep in there. Several officers arrived, and Ms. Siyonbola showed them the key to her apartment and…
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