Shira Schoenberg, Mass Live News
Read Article“Black youth have been accustomed to — and therefore expect — to be treated with suspicion by police, regardless of whether they committed a crime,” attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School wrote in an amicus brief in support of Evelyn. “And Black youth are confronted regularly with the potentially deadly consequences of noncompliance, or even perceived noncompliance, with police.”
Katharine Naples-Mitchell, an attorney at the Houston Institute, said in an interview that black youth in segregated, poor communities like Roxbury, which bear the brunt of Boston policing, “experience suspicion as a default in police encounters,” a position learned from individual, family and societal experiences. “Race ends up being a factor in how people are policed and how policing happens,” Naples-Mitchell said.