Yale University announced Tuesday that an internal investigation had cleared a campus police officer accused of stopping a black New York Times writer’s son at gunpoint.
Columnist Charles M. Blow recounted his college-aged son’s experience in an angry series of tweets and in a column back in January.
He said his son, Yale student Tahj Blow, told him that he had been stopped at gunpoint on his way home from the campus library. Only after Tahj had been told to get on the ground did the officer ask him to produce ID and it wasn’t until Tahj came across a second officer later on that he was informed he matched the description of a robbery suspect, according to Blow’s account.
Conservative writers attempted to debunk Blow’s account when Yale later sent out a campus-wide email noting that the officer involved in the stop was also black.
The internal investigation “concluded that the officer drew his firearm in the ‘low ready’ position, with his finger off the trigger at all times, and put his weapon back in its holster in a matter of seconds,” according to a news release. The release went on to state that “the officer did not violate any Yale Police regulations regarding patrol procedures or the use of force.”
A message sent by university President Peter Salovey to the campus community acknowledged the thorny racial issues presented by the stop of Blow’s son, however. The columnist had invoked the police-involved killings of Ferguson, Mo. teen Michael Brown and Staten Island man Eric Garner in his original tweets.
“We also must continue to recognize that this incident intersected – in ways that were both public and very painful – with current national conversations on race, prejudice, policing, and the use of force,” the message read. “As we said in our earlier message, these are important and difficult issues, and there are real challenges here that we, as members of the Yale community and as citizens, must face.”
Blow wasn’t having it, though:
So, according to Yale, this was “in compliance with department policy”? No apology? #sigh http://t.co/36ZSmY338l
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) March 3, 2015
Hey, if it was my kid I’d be pissed too. Not even an apology for pulling out a gun on someone who was doing nothing remotely illegal, except for walking while black? And no, it doesn’t mean a thing that the officer in question was black: black officers are just as capable of promoting a racist cop attitude as their fellow officers of other races.
Blow made this sound like a racist. civil rights violating incident. Well, maybe not. He and Kristoff should stop writing columns about people they know, thus raising a conflict of interest. They always get those columns wrong.
HT, are you suggesting that the fact that a black officer pulled a gun on someone ¨who looked like¨ a suspect precludes this incident from being racial?
YES! Imagine if Herman Cain, Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, or Allen West were police officers. Yes, they’re black, but does anyone think that cabal of self-hating assholes would be any less likely than a racist white officer to unload on a black kid? #BlackLivesMatter wasn’t just aimed at telling white people that our lives matter, it was also about reminding black people that our lives matter. When you’ve been told by your country, by your community, by your government that your life, that black lives don’t really matter even some black people start to believe it.
Blow has been covering police shootings and abuse of minorities for years. He explained that he stopped listing the race of the officer years ago because he realized it was wholly irrelevant, that it’s the mindset of the police and how they interact with people of color are the defining factors and not the race of the victim of police brutality.