Ritchie’s Foreword is in my opinion a strong text because
she is giving us real life stories of these injustices that happened. This is
why I totally agree and want to talk about her point that she made where she
stated, “we need more efforts grounded in our communities to document police
violence against women and girls of color.”
I think
that the main reason why it is important to focus on communities itself first
is because they are smaller groups to start with spreading the word. What I
mean by this is, like Ritchie explained, when a young women got assaulted by
the officer the incident was able to spread quicker in her community leading it
to become a full report in a zine and allowing it to be spread further of her
injustice. When you start small it will eventually become bigger and a
community is the start way to allowing these real incidents to be recorded and
known. Ritchie does explain how collecting these stories and sharing them has
become a critical form of resistance led by marginalized women of color and
that is something that needed to be done because police violence is something
everyone should know about.
It’s
interesting how she mentions Chicago’s police because I know for a fact that we
have one of the most corrupt and violent police in the country. We hear about
it all the time in the news and yet I still haven’t seen these police officers
being locked like they should be for their aggressive and violent way that they
handle situations. However, even though I know how violent Chicago policemen
are, I was shocked by the fact that in 1972-1991 there were at least 120 Black
people who were tortured. Which is why I say again that its important to start
with communities in spreading the word and taking action to defend their own
and come together to end these cases that are not closed because the offenders
are walking freely.
Ritchie’s
article is containing mainly information from the 70s, 80s, 90’s, etc. But its
horrifying that to this day there are similar, if not worse, situations happening
to young Black women. There was an incident that actually happened in June 2015
where a 20-year-old Black woman named Charnesia Corley was raped but the police
of Texas defined it as “inspecting inside her vagina for drugs”. They charged
and arrested her for finding 0.02 ounces of marijuana. They did drop the charges
and yet they did nothing to the cops apparently and it wasn’t until months
after her case that they passed a new bill where policemen can’t search for
anything inside a person’s body without a search warrant. Injustice still goes
on to this day.
Police are meant to keep people safe and make our
communities better but really they bring disruption and injustice because power
gets to their heads and so far no one stops them.
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