Washington (CNN) – Police officers’ aggressive handling of a Black teenager in New Jersey wasn’t anomalous — it was part of an age-old pattern of treating Black men and boys as threats to be subdued.
In a video that went viral last week, two Bridgewater Township officers break up a fight at a mall between two boys: one White, the other Black. While the White teenager is pushed onto a nearby couch, the Black teenager is pinned to the ground and then handcuffed. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing the family of the Black teenager, said in a recent statement that the incident pulled into focus “the kind of racial bias that we need to root out of our system of policing.” –read more–