Politics

This White Woman's Story of Experiencing Police Brutality Has an Important Message

July 9th 2016

A woman from Texas has written a chilling viral Facebook post about experiencing police brutality as a white woman, and how much scarier it would be to experience as someone in the black community.

The user, who goes by the name Molly Suzanna, shared a post early on Thursday morning following the police killings of black men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Suzanna wrote that a cop pulled her over at the age of 19, and that she refused to sign a ticket from him, as she did not realize at the time that a person can go to jail for not signing one. She claimed that the officer told her to get out of the car as a result, and was very aggressive with her for resisting him:

"When I said I didn't want to sign it (not understanding any of the aforementioned stuff), he demanded I get out of the car. My father died three days later; it's what I'd been crying about. I was 150 pounds soaking wet (at 6'2", that's pretty slight), halfway through a BA at a private school with a 4.0, and terrified to be on the side of the road in the dark with a very angry man whom I didn't know. Instead of getting out of the car, I locked the door. I was afraid. I didn't know better. He kept screaming at me to, 'Stop f***ing crying!' It would have been so easy to deescalate the entire situation."

She wrote that he dragged her out of the car window, kicked her in the ribs, fractured her wrist, and bounced her head off the side of the car when he put her in the back of his car, "all while laughing."

"He called for backup and none of the other officers would touch me," she continued. "One even said, on camera, 'This is wrong, man. She ran a red light.' I, understandably, was hysterical. Crying. Screaming. Huge bruises starting to form on my face and body. Clothing torn. High heel even broke off."

Suzanna wrote that she has broken her silence on this experience for the first time on social media because of what happened to Castile and Sterling, noting that her fate would have been much worse as a black man.

"If I were a black man, I would be dead. Plain and simple. Pretty white girls don't get shot during wrongful arrests. Not any that I know of, and certainly not me. You can't deny white privilege and what it affords you. To deny it is to acknowledge it exists, that you are privy to it. You don't see it because it exists for you. Something is very wrong in this country. There is a sickness. Black men (and sometimes women) are dying. They are being gunned down. For no discernible reason, and at an alarming rate, by white officers."

The post has been been shared nearly 17,000 times and received 23,000 reactions on Facebook:

FacebookFacebook - facebook.com

Tensions between police and civilians continue to be an issue in the U.S.

According to The Counted, The Guardian's project on police killings, July has just begun and there have already been 24 people killed by police this month. 569 people have been killed in the U.S. by police officers so far this year. Of the people killed, 137 were black, 279 were white, 88 were Hispanic, 13 were Native American, 10 were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 42 were of unknown race.

33 of the people killed by police in the U.S. were women, and 536 were men, The Guardian found. Last year, 1,146 people were killed by officers.

The police force has experienced loss this year as well, especially following the Dallas shootout. To date, 26 officers have been killed, up 44 percent from 2015, according to USA Today.

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