Hey, I know that guy. I remember him telling me about this encounter, he was pretty upset about it. He’s actually a pretty awesome and laid back person, normally.
Maybe this story should go to inform the thread on when police can lie to you. It has several examples of cops just straight up lying to his face, trying to get him to admit to something he didn’t do. (Yeah, your perception is high enough that you thought that he was “mirroring you” but you couldn’t tell the color of his skin, or even the color of his jacket?)
In the news report, he talks about how he is ashamed of the language that he used, and how angry he presented himself as. I can understand though, if you get profiled and harrassed on a regular basis, eventually coming to a tipping point. I think another factor was that he was actually in a pretty safe place, a well lit grocery store, with plenty of cameras, and in an environment where people know him, as he is a well known and respected member of the community, it was pretty unlikely that they would have shot him. If he had acted out like that on the side of the road at night, he’d get a good chance of catching a bullet.
Anyway, just goes to show that a cop doesn’t actually have to kill a person in order to harm them. For every Black man shot, hundreds or thousands of these little encounters happen, beating and wearing them down, ensuring that they know that they are not considered to be citizens with equal standing to a white person.