SPECIAL REPORT: Police Shootings Launch New Fashion Trend

By Craig Bates

Black men hoping to not be killed by trigger-happy cops are snapping up the latest in body armor.

(OAKLAND) As an African American, Danny Thompson isn’t sure when it will happen, but he knows it will: a cop is going to shoot him while he’s defenseless.

Hoping to avoid the death that often accompanies a point-blank shooting of an unarmed person by someone who has been trained in weaponry, Thompson has bought five flak jackets—one each for him and his four sons.

“As a black man, you know the cops will eventually get around to shooting you, so you can’t be too careful,” Thompson, 42, told The Peoples News Tuesday as he left Dr. Jay’s Urban Clothing in Oakland, with the jackets from Rocawear’s new Body Armor line.

Thompson said he had considered buying the jackets even before the New Year’s Eve shooting of Oscar Grant. The 22-year-old man was laying prone in front of a kneeling BART cop when another officer, Johannes Mehserle, stood up and shot him.

News reports have speculated the Mehserle—who resigned from the force after the murder—was reaching for his taser but accidentally grabbed his gun and fired before realizing bullets don’t come out of a taser.

“So he is not only a bad cop, he’s a moron,” said Jacqueline Chalmers, secretary of defense for the New and Improved Black Panthers Party. “I mean, did he write out his officer’s test with crayons?”

The incident continued a long line of shootings of unarmed black men who were minding their own business. It can happen, as it did to Amadou Diallo (who was standing in front of his apartment building holding his wallet) or Sean Bell (who was just leaving his bachelor party).

If they are brought to trial, cops always use the same excuse, one that often convinces juries to acquit them: They feared for their lives.

“It’s like cops think black men have super powers that can turn a wallet into a weapon deadly enough to take down four armed cops,” said Jackson Hewitt, a sociology professor at UC-Berkeley, whose book “Negrophobia: Why Cops Fear Blacks” chronicles a history of this mistaken belief. “By all observations throughout history, however, blacks don’t have these kinds of paranormal abilities.”

Thompson, though, wishes he had some type of super power to shore up his defenses.

“With this jacket, I feel a little safer,” he said, “but it’s not going to save me if they aim for my head.”

Note: This article is satire, brought to you by the creative minds at The Peoples News.

© 2009 The Peoples News

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