The author of the acclaimed Chokehold: Policing Black Men writes on how the system treats African Americans with contempt: ‘whether police patrolled white areas as they do poor black neighborhoods,there would be a revolution’Chokehold: a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die.
The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something approximately the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.” “It is undisputed that chokeholds pose a tall and unpredictable risk of serious injury or death. Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer’s arm and the force applied, and the victim’s voluntary or involuntary reaction,and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim’s larynx, or trachea,or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as “do[ing] the chicken”, in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung.”Every black man in America faces a symbolic chokehold every time he leaves his homeWhen I keep on a hoodie, or everybody turns into a neighborhood watch personThere are more African Americans in the US criminal justice system than there were slaves in 1850Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com