The NY Times ran this interesting graphic with their report on the acquittal of three officers who shot and killed Sean Bell in 2006. It's worth a look.
One thing that sticks out is that, with a single exception, those on the receiving end are African-American. Cerbelli (whom I assume was white/caucasian), unlike the others, went out of his way to attack the police (Eleanor Bumpers allegedly "lunged" at officers while weilding a knife; however, the police had initiated the contact in attempting to evict Bumpers from her apartment...if you ask me, the case sounds suspiciously similar to that of my friend George James)...anyway, I digress...let's just note for the record that only a fool, or a wingnut (to paraphrase Richard Cohen) would fail to notice that, particularly for African-Americans, "police presence" can mean something quite different from what it means for the rest of us...and that's yet another example of the not-so-subtle inequality that your average wingnut insists "no longer exists."
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