The beating of Chris Linton was sad to watch. A 16-year-old black male was beaten by Boston Police until his face was bloody. When I took a look at the video on YouTube, it had been viewed nearly 30,000 times, reminding us of the perils of doing your dirt in a world with cell phone cameras.
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The event in question took place at Roxbury Community College, where Linton was inside one of the buildings charging his cell phone. He is not a student at the university, but had stopped to get the cell charged so he could take pictures of his new daughter at the hospital.
While it is not clear why police were following him, the story is that Linton had just escaped from a local youth detention center and had been tracked to the university. That's when the beating began.
The commentary on the video comes in loud and clear, as the woman holding the camera curses at the officers and tells us she's going to put the video on YouTube. Linton is now facing a plethora of charges, including resisting arrest and possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute in a school zone. Other circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear.
The beating of Chris Linton is a shame. We have to feel empathy for anyone in that situation. The problem, however, is that the officers can certainly argue that they were justified in using force to apprehend a suspect who'd previously escaped from police custody.
Additionally, from what I saw on the video, I am not sure there is clear evidence that police used excessive force. In other words, the case of Chris Linton is not as clear-cut as the case of another teenager, Jordan Miles, who was beaten by police on his way to his grandmother's house. In that situation, Miles didn't appear to be doing anything wrong, and police have yet to present any reason for chasing him in the first place.
Without knowing what happened in the case of Chris Linton one way or the other, there are a few things that seem clear: The life of Chris Linton seems to be stereotypically sad and familiar. Here is a situation of a 16-year-old boy who allegedly broke out of juvenile detention to visit the new daughter who he likely isn't in a position to provide for.
He wasn't a student at the university, but was stopping through to charge his cell phone. Oh yeah, he also happened to have marijuana on him that he was allegedly attempting to distribute. I am certainly not one to write Chris Linton off one way or the other (there's always hope and I've seen people come back from worse), but my heart drops when I picture this young man's journey through life and the criminal justice system. My heart sinks even further when I think about the life of his new daughter. Yes, we need to stand up and cheer for the power of young black males, but we must also acknowledge when some of us have gone astray.
Either way, there should certainly be an investigation in to the Chris Linton beating to determine if there was any police misconduct. Based on what I've seen thus far, it appears that no one will be disciplined. There is, however, the question of just how much force police should be expected to use when apprehending a suspect.
I keep wondering why men shot in the back by police officers almost always happen to be black, and why those police beatings on YouTube tend to feature black suspects. It appears that black people are still under a police state, where our margin of error is far slimmer than everyone else's. I can say that as bad as Chris Linton's criminal activity might have been, there are plenty of white college students on every campus in America who carry around just as much marijuana. So, let's not pretend that black males are the only people with the capacity to engage in criminal activity.
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