Historically, these units bring significant harm to the Black community.
Cuffed. Face down on the pavement. Police guns pointed at his head. Fernando Perez thought: “I’m about to get killed.”
It was 2015, and in Perez’s hometown of Baltimore, people were protesting the death of Freddie Gray who died there of fatal neck and spine injuries sustained while in police custody. Perez, was outside with friends near his home when a swarm of police officers showed up. “They came so deep with guns drawn, guns in our faces, telling us to get down, being aggressive, slamming us down,” says Perez. “It was chaos.”
Perez said the police told him they suspected the group was responsible for a break-in and cuffed them. It wasn’t until a sergeant arrived and de-escalated the situation that the officers released them. Some officers were part of the Gun Trace Task Force, an “elite” anti-crime unit assembled to take guns and violent criminals off the streets.
The unit was so corrupt that it became the target of an FBI investigation, and eight officers went to prison for a number of charges including
The post There’s nothing ‘elite’ about police units that beat and frame Black people, community leaders say appeared first on TheGrio.
