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| A screenshot taken from a viral video involving officers of the Huntsville Police Department |
You know the drill.
Young black men stalked, profiled, arrested (if lucky) for walking, shopping, seeking help, going to church, while black.
Neighborhood watch, police (on or off duty) acted appropriately.
The latest case of racial profiling happened in Huntsville, Alabama, nicknamed the Rocket City because of it's close association with the U.S. military and NASA. Huntsville is also known for its abundance of churches. A friend once described the city to a Canadian saying if you see something tall and it has a cross on it, it's a church, if it doesn't it's a rocket.
The Church pictured above is First Baptist Church, it is a beautiful edifice not only on the outside but inside as well. According to the Huntsville Police Department and reported by the media, Joshua Chukwuedozie Ude, 23, was arrested in the parking lot of the church, located at 600 Governors Drive, after Huntsville police said he was questioned about disruptive behavior during a service inside. Police said he became uncooperative and refused to leave.
According to a statement on the First Baptist Church website that is not what happened. The young men were taking pictures of the outside of the church (no crime), an usher invited them to attend service, initially they declined (should have followed their first instinct), decided to take him up on the invitation to see inside, walked down to the front row, sat down, took some pictures, and left. Unfortunately, their appearance inside the sanctuary made some members nervous and they alerted HPD and that's when all hell broke out in the parking lot.
Why did the young men make some members nervous and HPD react they way they did? For the answer, we have to look no further than THE ATTACK MACHINE, who says "people in Huntsville are giving benefit of doubt to a guy screaming he was arrested for going to church when you know that wasn't what he was stopped for."
What we know:"This guy" didn't have a gun, he had a camera (thank God). The only ones with guns were the police. You know, the people who are trained to protect and serve? Amazingly if these young men had run the police probably would have shot them and been acquitted.
Here is what we can assume:
- These guys appeared at the church, took video, alarmed people.
- This guy was under arrest
- He is fighting them from the minute the video starts
- They were not going to let him go.
- He kicks them
Amazingly if this guy puts a bullet in these cops, the same people whining about this would be the first grieving for a fallen officer.
- The cops were alerted to this incident, they did not just spawn out of nowhere
- The cops told this guy he was under arrest
- He was combatitve (sic)
- They were not there to “go to church”
- This guy will get a check.
Let's go back to the: These guys appeared at the church, took video, alarmed people declaratory statement. Why did these guys appearing at a church alarm people? Could it be the media enabled racial stereotype of the dangerous black man? I could understand their fear if black men had a documented history of violence towards whites, you know like slavery, lynchings, and bombing churches.
If there is any race of people who should fear another race of people and wonder if they are friend or foe, it's black people. What if black people automatically assumed every white person was a member of the KKK and wanted to bring back Slavery?
"There is a mean spirit on the loose, not only in Alabama, but America, and that's what makes this election so important". Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders (D. Selma)
23 comments:
There is too much unknown about this story to come to a solid conclusion but the one behavior that these three men exhibited that might have alarmed others was that they started taking pictures/video of the service right after they sat down. Even after the wide availability of smart phones, I can not recall seeing anybody at the churches I have attended take pictures or video during a service unless they had a loved one being baptized.
The church I grew up attending had a service violently disrupted a couple years ago when a group got up from their seats, rushed the altar and overturned the altar because they thought the Catholic Church worshiped Mary.
Could the incident at First Baptist been handled better, maybe, but we don't know everything that happened. We only have the 4 videos that were posted on youtube and the church statement.
What else do you need to know Brian?
What happened in the time frame between the two men left the service and the time they were arrested.
According to the HPD's statement, Udeh was being uncooperative, was asked to leave and refused and then he was arrested. I am curious to know what Udeh or his two friends have to say about what happened then.
I don't think the officers arrested him because he was black. Otherwise I would have expected that all three would have been arrested rather than just Udeh.
I will consent that there might have been some racial motivation in the church members reporting Udeh and his friends behavior as suspicious to the officers. But then again, we don't know the race or the motivation of those who reported the suspicious behavior. We can assume that they were not black, but then again, we know what happens when we assume.
Key words according to HPD Udeh was being uncooperative, was asked to leave and refused and then he was arrested.
My question is what was Udeah being uncooperative for/about? According to the statement by FBC they left the church building on their on accord, so they were leaving. It's impossible to leave being when you are being detained, and questioned by people in authority with guns. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
At first I was going to say it really doesn't matter what happened between the time they left service and the time they were arrested, but we know what happened, it's on YouTube.
The YouTube videos take place after Udeh was arrested. We don't know what they did after they left the church building. For all we know, they may have hanged around until the officers started to approach them. But that is an assumption.
Being uncooperative with police can be as simple as walking away while they are asking you a question. It might not sound fair, but they have a duty to investigate. The officers may have been put into a bad situation by the church members that reported the situation, but we should not make assumption based on facts on in evidence.
And no was not damned if you do, damned if you don't for Udeh. There is a simple question you can ask to know if you can leave. "Can I go now?" or "Can I leave?" or being more verbose "Am I being detain or may I leave?"
Be considerate with officers and most of the time they will be considerate with you. Most officers don't want to arrest anybody unless they have to. Arresting somebody means more work for them, even after the arrest. Now be a jerk to an officer and they might be willing to accept that additional work. Most people are like that. Be rude to the person delivering your pizza and you can become the person nobody wants to deliver to. Your pizza might suffer a rough ride to your house or take longer to get to you. You might not get as many toppings as most people do. But be nice to them, they will remember it and be nicer to you.
That advice might work for white people but it doesn't work for African Americans male or female. The pice said they were being disruptive during service, which they weren't, and that they were asked to leave, which they weren't, they were arrested for trespassing, which they weren't . This is what we know.
Redeye, the piece said that the police received a complaint about disruptive conduct during the church service, yes. Now nothing else that has been posted contradicts or confirms that. All we know from the FBS report is that one of the men in the church started taking pictures or video. Could that have been disruptive, to some people, yes, to all, probably not.
I partially agree with you that these men may have been racially profiled by somebody attending the church service, but I won't go as far as saying that they were. We don't know who made the complaint. We don't know the intention of the person making the complaint. For all we know, the person that made the complaint was black.
Now, that said, what the police officers did was proper. The church may not have asked the men to leave, but if the officers asked the men to leave and they didn't, the officers have grounds to arrest them on trespassing. But please note that only one, Udeh, was arrested. Not all three, but one. That tells me that Udeh was being uncooperative with the officers. The man who took the 1st video while being a little disruptive was not arrested. The man who took videos 2, 3, and 4, from what the videos show, was being respectful and the officers were showing him respect. They were not restraining him. So when you say that what I said doesn't work for African American males, his video, how the officers treated him, shows that you are wrong in this case. Maybe if Udeh had shown the same behavior, the same respect to the officers, as the 3rd man, he would not have been arrested.
Do you realize how condescending you sound?
I did not mean to sound condescending and if it came across that way, it was not intentional.
I am just trying to defend the officers involved because I don't think they did anything wrong. Might there have been a racial motivation behind the complaint that got the officers involve? Yes there might have been one. But once the complaint was made, they had a duty to investigate it. We don't know what transpired between the officers and the three men.
I believe if the arrest was racially motivated, we would have seen all three being arrested rather than just one. But we didn't see three arrests, just the one. That leads me to believe that the one arrested was being uncooperative with the officers.
In the videos that were posted on YouTube, we see different behaviors from each of the 3 men and we see the cops handle each one differently. The videos don't show the officers doing anything near the police brutality the videos are labeled with.
To be clear. You don't think it was wrong for the police to arrest the young men?
No I don't think it was wrong that the Joshua Ude was arrested. His brother and his friend were detained for a little bit longer while he was being arrested, but they were released at the scene. Only Joshua Ude was arrested, not his brother, not his friend. That tells me that Ude's brother and Ude's friend were cooperating with the officers and Ude himself was the one that was not cooperating.
Joshua Ude was not cooperating about what exactly
"According to a statement on the First Baptist Church website that is not what happened. The young men were taking pictures of the outside of the church (no crime), an usher invited them to attend service, initially they declined (should have followed their first instinct), decided to take him up on the invitation to see inside, walked down to the front row, sat down, took some pictures, and left. Unfortunately their appearance inside the sanctuary made some members nervous and they alerted HPD and that's when all hell broke out in the parking lot."
So two young black men walk into a church largely populated with an older white congregation and some of that congregation is sufficiently disturbed by their mere presence that they call the cops to round them up and roust them out. That's what this entire situation sounds like.
And as for Joshua Ude being uncooperative, I believe it's more or less a natural reaction to being manhandled. Come to think of it, why are they being manhandled in the first place?
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened at Union Hill Baptist Church. They were just on the wrong end of town, heh.
Being uncooperative is probably as simple as not complying with an officer's order. If they were ordered to leave by the officer and did not, that can constitute criminal trespassing. If Ude fought the arrest at any point, resisting arrest comes into play.
From the Code of Alabama - Section 13A-7-1 Part 4
A person "enters or remains unlawfully" in or upon premises when he is not licensed, invited or privileged to do so. A person who, regardless of his intent, enters or remains in or upon premises which are at the time open to the public does so with license and privilege unless he defies a lawful order not to enter or remain, personally communicated to him by the owner of such premises or other authorized person.
We know the officers were hired by the church to provide security and traffic control which makes them authorized persons. So the question is: Was the order to leave a lawful order?
And from the video, we only saw two of the three being manhandled in anyway. The third man was for the most part left alone. Of the two who were manhandled, only one of them was arrested. I do believe that their filming during the service was what disturbed whoever made the compliant rather than just mere presence. How many people do you see in the average service filming the service unless it involves somebody close to them, i.e. somebody's baptism?
They were leaving,strike that, they were trying to leave. Refusal to comply with the police orders to do what exactly?
Do we actually know if they were trying to leave?
We know they left the service. There are sections of the timeline we don't know. We don't know if the complaint about their behavior happened while they were still in the service or after they left the service. We don't know if they left the service but remained on the church property to take more picture and/or video of the church property.
What is an officer supposed to do if you keep walking away after they try to stop you to ask you a question?
What is an officer supposed to do if you refuse to leave after they have given you an order to leave?
Why would an officer arrest only one if all three were behaving the same way?
This is what we do know, Ude was arrested for trespassing, which he wasn't. And I believe you have the Code of Alabama - Section 13A-7-1 Part 4 confused with the Alabama
Slave Code, Article 1 sec. 1008 http://www.archives.alabama.gov/cornerstone/slavecode1852/page02.html
"We be Free"
Nope, don't have anything confused.
http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/acas/codeofalabama/1975/coatoc.htm
If I am asked to leave WalMart by an officer and I don't, I expect I will be arrested. If I visited your house and you asked me to leave and I don't, I would expect to be arrested.
I asked some questions but instead of answering them, you decided to sink to a level you would deem fit to take corrective action against me if I sunk that low. Claiming I am confusing the Code of Alabama with the Alabama Slave Code is insulting and defaming.
Look, we have this little thingy call "probable cause" in America, or at least we used to until the righty's got control of the justice system and turned it into the INjustice system. A policeman cannot walk up on you in in Walmart,or any place else and ask you to leave just because he's a police officer. Ude was arrested for a crime he did not commit.
"Probable" in this case may relate to actual statistical probability, or to a general standard of common behavior and customs. The context of the word "probable" here is not exclusive to community standards and does not predate statistics, as some have suggested.[1]In United States criminal law, probable cause (also referred to as reasonable cause) is the standard by which an officer or agent of the law has the grounds to obtain a warrant for, or as an exception to the warrant requirements for, making an arrest or conducting a personal or property search, etc. when criminal charges are being considered. It is also used to refer to the standard to which a grand jury believes that a crime has been committed. This term comes from the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"Probable" in this case may relate to actual statistical probability, or to a general standard of common behavior and customs. The context of the word "probable" here is not exclusive to community standards and does not predate statistics, as some have suggested.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause
I wish people would protect and defend the first and fourth amendment rights with the same zeal they defend the second amendment rights. Really, I do.
Correction: I wish people would protect and defend first and fourth amendment rights with the same zeal they defend second amendment rights. Really, I do.
Thanks for sharing, nice post!
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