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Last month, as five young black boys in Grand Rapids were walking home from their local recreation center where they had been playing basketball, they were swarmed by local police, who drew their guns, and held them at gunpoint for over 10 minutes, as the boys cried and wailed in fear and confusion. The incident happened nearly a month ago, but the body camera footage from it was just released.

It’s awful.

They were just babies, in elementary and middle school, and had absolutely no idea what was going on.

“I don’t want to die,” one boy cried out to the officers.

“Can you please put your guns down?” pleaded another boy.

Throughout it all you can hear the gut-wrenching sobs of one of the boys.

 

]A fight had broken out in the city earlier that day. One of the witnesses claimed he saw a young man in that fight drop a small gun. When police later saw these young boys walking home, they claimed they matched the earlier descriptions.

That was, it appears, all police needed to scar these kids for the rest of their lives. After swarming and surrounding them with their guns drawn for 10 minutes, the police then handcuffed each of the boys and put them in backs of their police cars.

None of them were armed and police later admitted that these boys were not the suspects they were looking for. Everything about how this went down was wrong, but from the very beginning the police on the scene seemed to believe they were providing the community with a great service.

They weren’t.

First and foremost – these kids didn’t do anything wrong. And really don’t know if the young man involved in the earlier fight actually had a gun at all. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. Whatever the case, these five kids weren’t in that fight and were completely unarmed. To force all of them into a terrifying life or death situation based on that report is a uniquely black experience. If such incidents happen in white communities, where elementary and middle school aged boys walking home from the park, get swarmed by police at gunpoint, I’ve never heard about them. But this happens to black folk in America every single day.

Secondly, many of the boys who were held at gunpoint by police aren’t even close to matching any descriptions given by an eyewitness. The others had on clothes that were so common that half of the young black boys in Grand Rapids could’ve been suspects.

Lastly, the police grossly overreacted. They never saw guns on these children. They never saw anything that looked like a gun on these children. That 10 minutes into the encounter, officers still had their guns drawn on the children makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

These kids could’ve been patted down and released in less than 90 seconds. Even that would’ve been humiliating, but 10 minutes? Some of the officers were literally hiding behind their car doors like they were expecting an Old Western shootout. It was preposterous.

In the name of protecting the community from guns, these kids were then held at gunpoint for 10 minutes, then handcuffed and detained like dangerous criminals. Far more harm was done to these young boys than the police seemed capable or willing to comprehend.

“Nobody was hurt,” said one of the officers to a terrified parent on the scene who was overcome with emotions seeing her innocent son held at gunpoint by police.

If by “hurt,” the officer means nobody was shot, then that’s correct, but that’s a low bar for doing no harm. Every child and parent involved in this horrendous debacle was hurt. The psychological trauma they experienced is both deep and real. That trauma is not imaginary – it’s very real. And police, of all people, who have high rates of suicide, domestic violence, and drug abuse, in great part because of the psychological trauma of what they experience every single day, should understand that.

This was wrong. The Mayor and Police Chief have both apologized for the incident, but the apologies ring hollow when out of the other side of their mouth they’ve also said that the officers did nothing wrong. The apology feels like little more than lip service.

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