Delivering Amazon Packages While Black, Just Another Mundane Thing Black Folks Can’t Do.

The list keeps getting longer and longer.

Let this be a lesson to white people: the police have less self-awareness than the Becky in accounting who brought the sushi casserole to the company picnic. Even as protests continue in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, cops just can’t help but escalate a situation that could have just as easily been calmed down by the officer in charge not being an asshole.

I’m sure that all this Warren police officer wanted to do was bring justice to the suburban streets. He saw an Amazon vehicle parked the wrong way on the road, and by pure coincidence the driver just so happened to be a young black man, who was literally delivering a package to a kind old white lady. This officer just couldn’t help but do good by exiting his vehicle, and rather than, I don’t know, politely asking the young man to park the right way and then getting the fuck on with his muh’fuckin’ business, decided to escalate the situation by repeatedly stating that the package deliverer, who had just delivered a package, didn’t have a right to park on the wrong side of the street because he wasn’t working for the postal service.

Perhaps you’re thinking “well if the guy was done delivering the package, why not just let him be on his way?” To that I can only assume that the Warren police officer had no good excuse, seeing as though his punkass sought to waste more energy harassing a guy who was just doing his job and could’ve been on his way in like 30 seconds if his donut eating ass hadn’t chosen that moment to pick a fight.

As an aside, it’s funny how quickly dashcam and body camera footage shows up when it serves the police, isn’t it? When footage shows something like, I dunno, a police officer suffocating a man to death while a film crew records it for a show, the footage from the department is mired in red tape, it takes a year for the footage to get released, and the film crew decides to destroy the evidence. But when the police want to prove an officer isn’t a racist prick, wouldn’t you know it, the footage is easily gotten in less than twenty-four hours!

Anywho, Warren police commissioner Bill Dwyer is recommending that the young man, who (again) was just doing his fuckin’ job and could’ve easily been let go with a warning but who was instead placed in a headlock and tossed to the ground while he was in the act of trying to get his license (complying with the officer’s demand to see it, even though he didn’t fucking need to, because fuck me, there has to be better shit to do with your fucking day) be charged with felony resisting of arrest, failure to obey a lawful command, and failure to produce a driver’s license. (Ya know, the thing the guy was going to show him before the aforementioned headlocking and tossing to the ground.)

You can hear the Amazon deliverer’s anguished screams of terror, because he thinks he’s gonna die. I mean, that’s what I would be thinking in that situation, with police violence everywhere in the news. The neighbors who bore witness to this were almost all white, and were able to calm the man down.

Because the Warren police officer is a coward, he called for back-up to restrain a man who he was significantly heavier than.

I don’t think it can be underestimated how quickly this whole situation could have turned deadly, and all over a fucking traffic violation. Of course, that’s nothing new; Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, and Samuel DeBose were all executed by police during “routine” traffic stops, all murdered by cops who could’ve prevented deaths if they had stopped for just a moment and tried to de-escalate the situation.

None of this was necessary. This was a man who was doing what is often demanded of black people; making an honest living, delivering packages to little old white ladies, not kicking up a fuss or bothering anyone. This officer, like so many officers, was looking for a reason to kick some shit off. I have little doubt that if the officer had approached a white man, his entire attitude would have been different. But because the delivery driver had melanin in his skin, the officer approached him like most police officers approach most black people.

As guilty before proven innocent, and as criminals before being civilians. This officer didn’t see the delivery driver as an ordinary man doing an painfully ordinary job; he saw him as just another n-word trying to flout the law, and he took it upon himself to make himself the judge and the jury. It was only because there were so many white people trying to do what the officer was supposed to do and de-escalate the situation that he wasn’t the executioner.

“It’s critical the public understands to not put all police officers and paint them with a broad brush that they’re bad officers,” Dwyer said during a press conference about the incident. And you know what, I agree.

After all, you can’t paint all police officers as bad cops, when all cops are bad. They’re not “bad”; they’re just cops.

The delivery driver was released and the officer was place on paid leave.