Police Assaults on African American Women: Close Encounters of a Dangerous Kind by Rev. Daniel Buford | Tikkun Magazine

25.4.18

Police Assaults on African American Women: Close Encounters of a Dangerous Kind by Rev. Daniel Buford | Tikkun Magazine: Unarmed Women, Girls of African Descent and Violent Police Encounters- Arbitrary Punishments, Detentions, Killings, Torture, Extra Judicial Punishments, Summary Executions 1982-2015

Complied by Daniel A. Buford, Executive Director

Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Berkeley, CA

September 3, 2016

The list is a compilation of thirty cases of unarmed African women and female children and the violent encounters they experienced at the hands of law enforcement agencies from every region of the United States. This list is an excerpt of a “Shadow Report” that I am in the process of preparing to be submitted to the United Nations human rights treaty bodies over the next five years of periodic treaty review in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Cases that are listed here are noteworthy in the current national discussions about the Black Lives Matter movement.

While most of the Black Lives Matter discussions and media attention have focused on the foul law enforcement treatment accorded to African American men and boys, very little attention or scrutiny is being devoted to the alarming numbers of African American women and girls who are often treated even worse than Black men in unarmed encounters with police officers. An example of this is the rough physical treatment that mothers, girls, and pregnant women experience. The publication of this list with brief descriptions of these encounters is my attempt to talk about rogue police behavior in the larger context of racially motivated state sponsored terrorism that has spiked dramtically in the years that Barak Obama has been President of the United States.