Can Blacks 'Get a Little' Ahmad Rahami Treatment?

Meaning not getting gunned down whenever cops want to talk or apprehend them: Shaun King
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 20, 2016 1:40 PM CDT
Can Blacks 'Get a Little' Ahmad Rahami Treatment?
Ahmad Rahami: injured but alive.   (Nicolaus Czarnecki/Boston Herald via AP) /The Boston Herald via AP)

Shaun King is relieved cops caught New York/New Jersey bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami Monday. And he calls it "amazing" in his essay for the New York Daily News that the two police officers in Linden, NJ, who apprehended Rahami were able to bring in the armed 28-year-old alive, all while escaping serious injury themselves. King offers them kudos for removing Rahami as a public safety threat, for risking their own lives to catch him, and for doing it without killing Rahami, ensuring officials can at least try to pull some answers out of him about his alleged actions. But the fact that Rahami still has a pulse leads King to another question he can't stop pondering: "Can African-Americans all over the country get a little of that Ahmad Khan Rahami treatment?"

King refers to the fact that, despite a violent confrontation with Rahami in which he allegedly shot at officers, he was brought into custody alive and mostly intact, because "somebody somewhere wanted Rahami to be brought alive for questioning." And that's a luxury King says African-Americans don't seem to be afforded when confronted by the police. King references several high-profile cases of black men gunned down, including Terence Crutcher, the unarmed Oklahoma man shot dead by police Friday—a man King says wasn't armed, dangerous, or "even a suspect." "Maybe if [these black men] had shot up a movie theater or a church or planted a bomb in Chelsea—they'd all be alive right now, but somebody would have to actually have wanted to take them in alive," King writes. "Black folk don't get that treatment." (King's full column here.)

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