Thursday, July 19, 2018

A commentary still relevant today (Family Matters, 1994)

The news that a hometown police officer was not indicted by a grand jury for shooting an unarmed African-American man nearly a year ago predictably hasn't set well with the victim's family and the African-American community.

Messiah Cooper, the uncle of the victim, Dahmeek McDonald, led a protest, calling for Troy Mayor Patrick Madden to create a citizens group of some kind to address the disconnect between the police and the African-American community. Troy police officer Jarrod Iler shot McDonald four times, acting on the assumption that McDonald had a gun (he didn't), and the shooting started as McDonald was pulling away in his car. McDonald was found to have cocaine in his possession, but it seems that, in the minds of the police, Iler acted properly. Cooper and his supporters see it the opposite way, that Iler over-reacted.

This was just another incident between African-Americans, mostly unarmed, and police, mostly white officers, in the last few years, across the country. All this does, in this writer's opinion, is set race relations back at least 50-60 years.

In 1994, the producers of Family Matters, with the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles still fresh in people's minds two years after the fact, addressed the issue of racial profiling among white officers. In this poignant, pivotal scene, Sgt. Carl Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson), upset over his son, Eddie (Darius McCrary), being roughed up over a mere traffic violation, confronts the two white cops who were involved in the case. A rookie cop, paired with a veteran mentor who is exposed as a racist, gets a hard lesson in the reality of police work.



Carl would eventually calm Eddie down long enough for them to file a complaint the next day, and that was the end of the episode.

Would that this lesson could still be taught today.


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