Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Philip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray.
These are the names of unarmed black males who have been killed by police just in the past year. (As you might guess this is not an all-inclusive list.) There have been protests against these killings but in none of these incidents has an officer been fired or indicted as a result of their actions, even though in all of these cases murder was clearly not justified or necessary. (I may be just a civilian but even I know that killing a suspect isn't the first and only option.)
Fast-forward to June 5, 2015. A young girl is manhandled by a McKinney, Texas police officer and the city loses its fucking mind. Massive protests result in the resignation of the officer in question even though no one was so much as bruised during the altercation.
I know this so unlike me but I'm going to be blunt; There's a huge double-standard at play here, one that says the life of cute young women somehow outweighs the life of men and, in the case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, boys, too. If officer Casebolt had tackled one of the boys rather than the young lady this story would have been a minor blip on page 37b and forgotten by lunch. This is because we know that men, especially black men, are just no damn good... even if they're President, according to Fox News.
Let me go farther and say that officer Casebolt might still be on the job, although on vacation with pay, it he'd instead shot and killed the young woman instead of tackling her. Such is the "stand your ground/feared for my life/get-out-of-jail-free" bullshit the police get to flaunt in our faces.
So what's the lesson here? I guess that black men should wear bikinis when dealing with the police. Makes for bad optics if something goes wrong.