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Seven-Year-Old Black Child Arrested, Cuffed,
Fingerprinted
in Baltimore a City with a
Black Mayor, Sheila Dixon
After the Mayor apologizes for the arrest of Gerard Mungo Jr., City
Police arrest Gerard's mom
“If they want war, they’ll have war,” said Marvin
“Doc” Cheatham,
president of
the NAACP Baltimore Chapter outside Central Booking
I
am very concerned about what I am hearing. As a mother and as a
parent, I am bothered by it,”
[Mayor
Sheila Dixon] she said. “I will get to the bottom of
this.”
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BALTIMORE - Gerard Mungo Jr. starts to
cry when he tells the story of his arrest by
the Baltimore City police. Since he was
handcuffed, photographed for a mug shot and
fingerprinted Tuesday afternoon — all for
allegedly sitting on a dirt bike on a
sidewalk — Gerard said he is afraid to talk
about it.
“They
scared me,” he said, before breaking down in
tears.
Gerard,
who just turned 7 in February, was pulled
off the dirt bike he sat on — with the motor
off — by police while waiting for his father
to pick him up in East Baltimore, according
to his mother, Likisa Dinkins. Dinkins said
she was incensed after the police pulled
Gerard up by his collar and dragged him off
the bike.
Seven-year old Gerard Mungo Jr. sits back on
his living room couch after telling the
story of his arrest by the Baltimore City
Police Department.
“I told
them to let go of my baby,” she said. “Since
when do you pull a 7-year-old child by his
neck and drag him?
“It
broke my heart the way they were treating
him.”
Dinkins
said she called for a police supervisor to
intervene, but after he arrived, Dinkins
said, he started scolding her son.
“The
started yelling at him, ‘Do you know what
you did wrong, son?’” she said. “He was so
scared he ran upstairs.”
After
police confiscated the dirt bike, Dinkins
said, the police said her son was under
arrest.
“They
put his hands behind his back and put him in
black metal handcuffs. They handcuffed a
7-year-old child,” she said. “I cannot
believe they did this to a child.”
Gerard
was brought to the Eastern District station
house, where he was cuffed to a bench, then
interrogated, he told The Examiner.
“They
asked about my mother,” he said.
Charging documents state that Gerard was
charged with riding a dirt bike on city
streets. He was released into the custody of
his parents after being fingerprinted and
photographed.
Mayor
Sheila Dixon said she was concerned about
the arrest.
“I am
very concerned about what I am hearing. As a
mother and as a parent, I am bothered by
it,” she said. “I will get to the bottom of
this.”
Police
officials said they did not have enough
information on the arrest to comment before
press time.
Dinkins’ only concern is for her son’s
well-being.
“This
has changed his life,” she said. “He’ll
never be the same.”
Stephen Janis,
The Examiners
/
janis@baltimoreexaminer.com /
Mar 15, 2007 3:00 AM (1 day ago)
posted 16 March 2007
http://www.wbaltv.com/news/11271436/detail.html?taf=bal
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Response
Gerard’s
sitting on his bike near or on a public road
reservation, could well raise some public safety and
wellbeing issue. Such a misbehavior however, does
not rise to the level of a crime warranting the
draconian act of arrest, handcuffing and physical
abuse of a 7-year old child! In a “civilized”
society, we would expect the “Peace Officers,” if
Peace Officers these … can be called, to explain to
little Gerard Mungo Jr. the dangers presented by an
underage child riding on the road. Next,
professionally, the Police Officers would escort the
child home. Then notify his parent(s) of the
problems and consequences of leaving their child
unsupervised, sitting on his bike on the side of the
road.
The barbaric
act against a Black 7-year old, by public officials
in a city with a black Mayor and a black
Commissioner of Police may be pointing to a larger
societal problem–a severe crisis in America.
Well thinking persons may conclude that if public
officials believe that a child can be abused with
impunity in a “civilized” state, then such a society
must be wobbling into deeper and deeper calamity.
Imbibed racist values and its siblings, our
dominant, redundant social, economic and political
principles are the best explanation for the City of
Baltimore’s shameful conduct. It is a sign of social
bankruptcy! If our society is morally bankrupt, it is
a condition created by the germ of our dominant
bankrupt social, economic and political worldviews.
Thus Baltimore’s shame cannot be blamed on the
offending policemen, only. Instead it must be laid
squarely on the shoulders of our elites, whose ideas
and standard of social conduct created the injustice
that Gerard Mungo Jr. experienced in Baltimore.—Lloyd D. McCarthy,
author of
In-Dependence from Bondage
* * * *
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After the Mayor apologizes for the arrest of Gerard Mungo
Jr., City Police arrest Gerard's mom
“If they want war, they’ll have
war,” said Marvin “Doc” Cheatham,
president of the NAACP Baltimore
Chapter outside Central Booking
* * * *
*
The officer took the boy to the Eastern District
station, where Mungo Sr. and Dinkins say he spent
two hours handcuffed to a bench. If there were a
Richter scale that measured outrage, this incident
would have blown the needle off the thing. . . .
Dinkins said the officer who arrested Gerard is
white, as is the officer's supervisor, who came to
the scene after she complained. . . . What
she might see if she looked in the mirror is the
fury still in her eyes one week after, she says, the
arresting officer waved a pair of handcuffs in her
face and told her just before he arrested Gerard,
"He's coming with me." . . . .. But Dinkins,
[Police Commissioner Leonard D.] Hamm said, called
for a supervisor. It was after the supervisor
arrived that Gerard was arrested. Hamm said police
are investigating what happened between the
supervisor and Dinkins that led to the arrest. .
. . In her house later, Dinkins said the
supervisor "loud-talked" Gerard, raising his voice
and bellowing, "Son, do you realize what you did was
wrong?" . . . . It was after she demanded that the
supervisor leave that Gerard was arrested, Dinkins
said.
"I think they're mad because I asked for a
supervisor," Dinkins said. "Gerard told me that the
police officer who arrested him told him that 'if it
weren't for your mother calling my boss, you
wouldn't have went to jail.'"—Gregory
Kane, "It's a crime that police arrested dirt-bike
kid." (Sun, 21 March 2007)
posted 16 March 2007
/ repost 26 March 2007
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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