US police are investigating the suspicious death of
a black university advisor who died after being arrested for allegedly acting
irrationally.
Police in Maryland shackled Patrick Raphael Toney on Friday and sent him to hospital with a hood over his head. They said Toney was acting strangely near his parked car at an intersection when he was arrested.
On the way to hospital, the academic stopped breathing but medics managed to revive him. On Wednesday, the hospital notified police that Toney had died.
He had been arrested on April 12 on child abuse charges and released on bail just hours before he was arrested on Friday.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Randy Short, who is with the Baltimore Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to further talk over the issue. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: I like to get your take on the specific case of Mr. Tony, specifically before we get into the entire issue of racially-motivated police abuse in the United States.
Short: In defense of a man who is not alive to speak for himself, I actually knew Patrick Tony; I worked for Bowie University for exactly one year and everybody loved this man.
I found him to be wonderful to work with, a collegial kind caring person that students and the faculty alike loved.
So I am saddened and wounded that this has happened and feel that the families and the students all need prayer and support to deal with this shocking activity that has occurred.
Having said that, to me, we have not seen full evidence that the police, in my view, did not do some things that could have contributed to him dying.
For instance, they are saying that he acted irrationally while there is a thing called a dash cam. That needs to be produced so we can see what happened during the arrest.
There has been a pattern across the country of police either hiding or not showing what the dash cam records.
We do not know how he was restrained; we do not know their ways that you can touch someone or restrain them that could cause injury.
This happened to a friend of mine who is also a professor who was attacked by police at Delaware State University; they dislocated his shoulder in such a way that she would not notice that.
So I am not convinced that there was not excessive use of force in restraining the man. As well, if you perceive someone is having a psychological problem, why did not they immediately get some psychological support? They have to have the capacity to do that.
Press TV: Dr. Short, this case obviously comes in the back of the much spoken case of Trayvon Martin and many other cases in the United States.
How are things looking right now for African-Americans in the United Sates and other minorities as well?
Short: Well, I am going to focus on my own people and simply say that we tend to be indices for how everyone else is treated.
Police brutality is at an all time high. I was at a conference in Chicago for the international human rights association of American minorities to have a talk with lawyers and academics for how we can go to the United Nations to begin to bring up police departments and in fact, this government on its human rights violations against the African-Americans.
To give an example of how bad it is, the former mayor of Chicago, Mayor Daley has to give testimony in the upcoming weeks because he was part of covering up a system of torture, abuse and cruelty to hundreds of blacks in the city of Chicago where they had an electrical device that they would attach to people’ sexual parts and ran electricity through them to force them to confess to crimes that they did not commit.
There are still people in jail. I mean, this is a mayor of a city; this is a person who literally controls in the most important states politically in the country in on allowing this kind of gross human rights violation where they had a thing called a ‘Negro Box’, where they would crank electricity into people used cattle prod on peoples’ scrotums.
This is the second or third largest city in the country allowing these things to happen where as many as 30 men are still in jail, if not more, and hundreds of people were tortured and it took the UN’s intervention for people to even acknowledge that there were a group of rogue, brutal, fascistic cops in Chicago and detectives that were torturing, beating and framing people for crimes and everyone knew no one would do anything about it. I do not think it is Chicago; I think it is a nation and not show, we are 40, 50, 60 million people.
We are a national minority group that does not have control over its own destiny; the legal system works against us; the economic system works against us and in reality, it is time for us to talk about a new constitution in America that we make our amendments for how the society is better versus judge waiting for people to stop doing what they are going to do anyway.
In reality, it is like an abused child going to an abusing parent and asking them to stop abusing; that is the situation that African-Americans face.
Press TV: With an African-American now as the president of the United States are things looking bright for the future of African-Americans as well as other minorities?
Short: No, first of all, he is not an African-American. I keep repeating that. That would be the same as me calling an Azeri, with an African parent, a Farsi in Iran.
I mean, does it show that we lack self-determination that anyone that comes to this country that happens to be black is somehow the same thing as me?
His family was not in this country, at least not the black people in this country; 400, 500 years ago like my family was.
This is obnoxious and it is outrageous that these people who dominate us tell us who we are.
There is nothing worse you can do to people than to deny them their identity, to tell them who is in their group.
Things are worse for African-Americans whether he wins or loses because the system is set up to oppress us.
We do not have self-determination; we are not in control of our destiny; we are brought here and enslaved.
Slavery was a process and we have been kept down and it does not matter who the president is if this system remains unchanged.