Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Crime in the Media Fall 2020

https://www.netflix.com/watch/70267488?trackId=14170286&tctx=2%2C0%2C4681b394-33c3-49cc-b48e-0af1cf65e701-93327793%2C8daa9611-ceb7-402b-b32a-0d4d17c151ca_60737154X3XX1607298576555%2C8daa9611-ceb7-402b-b32a-0d4d17c151ca_ROOT%2C

The film I decided to write about is the movie called Fruitvale Station. This movie is about a 22-year-old black man named Oscar Grant, who is trying to get his life together for the sake of his girlfriend and for his daughter. The movie reveals the last moments of Oscar’s life, where he went to San Francisco to watch fireworks on New Year’s Eve with his friends and his girlfriend. On the way back home, Oscar was involved in an altercation with a few police officers that resulted in his murder. This sad story is based on a true story.

This movie presented some key points, the first being that there is a clear difference between the way white people are judged for committing crimes and the way black people are judged. In the movie Fruitvale Station, Oscar met a white man while they waited for their partners to come back from the bathroom. The man asked Oscar if he was planning on marrying his girlfriend, and he said that he wanted to but did not have enough money for a ring. The white man told Oscar that he stole the wedding ring for his wife before they got married, and told Oscar that he probably should not go down that same road. The producer may not have meant for it to be taken this way, but I believe that both the man and Oscar knew that there would be a different outcome if he had tried to steal a wedding ring for his girlfriend.

The most important part of this movie happens whenever Oscar gets involved in a fight on the train and the police are called. Whenever the police arrive, they grab Oscar’s friends and put them on the ground. Oscar, who is on the train at this point, tries to hide his face from the police. One officer yelled for everybody who was involved in the fight to get off the train. When nobody gets off, the officer steps on and pulls Oscar off the train. The officer did not even know who was involved in the fight, so racial profiling played a role in this incident. We talked about something similar to this in class. There was an elderly woman who was attacked in her home. She described the attacker as a black man, and in response, the police rounded up over two hundred black men and brought them in for questioning (Davis, 102).

Before watching this movie, I had my own stereotypes of police officers and how they do their jobs. I believed that there are a lot of police officers who are corrupt and use their badge as power. My stereotype was based on personal experience and what I have seen for myself. This movie only confirmed my stereotypes of police officers. In the movie, the police officers pushed, punched, kicked, and assaulted all of the black men. They treated them like animals, and whenever one officer felt like their power was being threatened, he used a derogatory term a number of times. It was uncomfortable to watch.

The last key point I got from this movie is how the system tends to fail the victims and their families. Most of the time, the officers who kill innocent minorities basically get away with their crimes. Other times, the court takes an excessively long time to reach a verdict, so the family has to suffer for an extended time. The police officers involved in this incident were fired, and the general manager and chief of the BART police department stepped down. The police officer claimed that he mistook his gun for his taser. After killing an innocent black man, the police officer who shot Oscar was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to two years in prison, however, he was released after 11 months. It does not make sense to me how somebody who killed a person can get out after only 11 months. This movie relates to the essay we read called, Do Black Lives Matter to the Court? In this essay, the writers talk about how there are racial injustices in the way victims receive justice. “Almost fifty years later, the United States Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigations…detailed similar systematic racial discrimination that reflects the “double standard” of justice” (Davis, 258-2590. Black people have always been seen as inferior to other races, so we are the last to receive equality.

Police brutality is something almost everybody has seen a video of, however, I have seen it in real life. This is nothing new to me. I have seen my sister being slammed and choked by the police. I have seen my mother pushed and shoved by the police. It gets harder to watch with every new incident that occurs, but it is important to know about. That is why I think everybody should watch this movie. This movie kind of shows what it is like to be in the middle of an altercation like that. The movie was written by Ryan Coogler and was released in 2013.

Reference

Davis, A. J. (ed.). (2018). Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Coogler, R. (Director), Coogler, R. (Writer), & Bongiovi, N. Y., & Whitaker, F. (Producers). (2013). Fruitvale Station [Motion picture]. United States: The Weinstein Company

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