New York Times Reporter Charles Blow Talks Son Being Stopped at Gunpoint by Yale University Police Over Robbery He Didn't Commit
Well-known New York Times reporter and TV commentator Charles Blow is railing against law enforcement after his son was recently stopped at gunpoint by Yale University campus weekend about a burglary he had nothing to do with.
In a heartfelt reaccounting of the incident as told to him by his son published in Monday's edition, Blow writes his son, a third year biology student at the Ivy League school, was leaving the library and returning to his dorm room just before 6 p.m. Saturday when he spotted an officer "jogging" toward the building he had just exited
Moments later, Blow said his son noticed he was actually being followed by the officer and quickly overheard him utter the words "I got him" into his radio. Before so much as being asked his name or for his ID, Blow insists his son found himself staring down the barrel of the officer's gun and ordered to get on the ground.
"Why was a gun drawn first" he wrote on Monday. "Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first? The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem. What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a "suspicious" movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back."
An outspoken critic of some of the actions attributed to officers during the recent police related killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, Blow added "I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out - earn your way out - of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you've done matters less than how you look."
The 18-year-old Brown was shot to death in early August during a confrontation with then Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson during which some witnesses still insist the unarmed teen had his raised in a surrendering stance to the officer. Not long after that, Garner was killed near his Staten Island home when officers approached him about allegedly selling loose cigarettes.
Video taken of the Garner incident shows him being pinned to the ground and choked by officers, even as he uttered his final words of "I can't breathe." The 12-year-old Rice was shot and killed in a neighborhood park after Ohio police apparently mistook a toy gun he was playing with for a real weapon. The incidents sparked numerous protests across the country.
Blow later revealed the dean of the college and campus police have apologized and insist a full investigation of the incident will be conducted. "But scars cannot be unmade," he reflected. "My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him."
Police have since arrested a suspect in the Yale case.
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