“These cops got to stop this. They’re shooting people like crazy….”

Candlelight vigil for Khiel Coppin – I pray no-one ever has to do one of these for me!

I was gonna do a post about how f-cked up the NYPD was after the Khiel Coppin murder but never found the time to get to it. Then again after the one year anniversary of the Sean Bell shooting and the murder of David Kostovski with my angle being that, as a Black male in NYC, I am and have good reason to be scared of the NYPD, but again didn’t get to it. But an incident that happened to me personally last Friday night sealed the deal and prompted me to finally write this post and stop wasting my time with the usual BS about mp3’s, mixtapes, new videos, sneakers, George Bush and Iraq until I got this off my chest.

So I’m about to walk the one block to my apartment from the subway after hanging out for a bit with some co-workers after our annual office holiday party. It’s about 1:30am and as I come out of the station I see an NYPD van parked in the middle of the road with a bunch of cops around it and one white civilian woman. I briefly make eye contact with the woman and glance at some of the cops but keep walking without paying any of them any particular mind. As I approach the gate to my apartment complex though I notice the van has passed me by and is now right outside my building with the cops all coming out of it. “What’s going on?” I wonder but just as I’m about to go to put the key in the gate to my apartment, they call out to me:

“Excuse me sir, where are you coming from?”

“From the city,” I reply confused.

“Where exactly?

“From Lafayette and Canal.”

Now I’m getting nervous and stuttering ‘cos literally five or six HUGE cops are now surrounding me and towering over my skinny ass. I could barely remember the info I just gave them and am kicking myself cos, if they start asking me more detailed questions, I don’t even know the name of the bar I’ve just been hanging out in for the past hour even though I even had the flyer in my back pocket (as I discovered later). I hadn’t done anything wrong but I felt nervous, jumpy and guilty just having these dudes looking at me like I’m some kind of a suspect.

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