Why even ‘the Atlanta way’ faces a reckoning on policing – By Patrik Jonsson (CS Monitor) / June 25 2020
Atlanta is famous for being the city “too busy to hate.” But “the Atlanta way” is being tested by the shooting of Rayshard Brooks and a wrenching debate on race.
When Atlanta resident D.J. Jones watches the video of the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, he squints with the eye of someone trained in armed diplomacy.
Mr. Brooks was killed on June 12 after being questioned for over 30 minutes by two white Atlanta police officers after they found him asleep in his car at a Wendy’s drive-thru.
At the point of arrest, Mr. Brooks panics, struggles with an officer, grabs a Taser, and flees. He is shot in the back. The officer says, “I got him.”
The escalation seemed contrived to Mr. Jones, a U.S. Army linguist. The way the officer repeated questions seemed calculated to his ear. “I thought, ‘He’s riling him up. He came to this call with an agenda.’”
Mr. Jones’ mission for more than a decade has been spanning the globe from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan as a street diplomat in a civilian suit, doing counterterrorism work by bridging the trust gap between disaffected neighborhoods and the powers that be.
Continue to article: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0625/Why-even-the-Atlanta-way-faces-a-reckoning-on-policing
