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My Letter
April 23, 2004
Charlottesville Police Department
Internal Affairs Unit
606 East Market Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Dear City Officials of Charlottesville, Virginia,
I am writing in response to your police department’s current actions of enforcing DNA testing of over 700 African American men.
As an African American woman, I feel you are enacting on a new form of racial profiling which could be compared to “driving while being black” that have plagued the New York/New Jersey Area for last several years. Such actions infringe on the basic rights that our government enforces. As a governmental agency, you are stepping a ground that you don’t want to tread within the African American community. This action upon African American males is not only constitutionally illegal but retorts the accomplishments of the last 50 years of the Civil Right Movement.
Your actions are not only unethical it’s also inhumane. You have resulted in treating African American men as if they were cattle or, to give a better example, as if they were slaves that you are searching for in your own DNA lynching party. This “search” must stop for it will be used in your parts of your country as basis to go back to pre-Civil War ideals that African Americans like Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mary McLeod Bethune fought so hard against.
Please ask yourself this one question, if the suspect that you are looking for was classified as being part of any other race than African American would you go to this step? You may say yes but within the ranks of the African American community the answer would be undeniably no.
I bereave you to please reconsider such an action. Not only for the sake of the African American Community but also for the sanity of both Charlottesville and the state of Virginia.
Sincerely,
Kaisha M. Harris
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Please write and tell of your opinion to this situation.
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