Only a few days after the New York Police Department’s #ThankYouNYPD fail took over Twitter, CNN’s #ASKACOP campaign allowed users to once again voice their frustrations with law enforcement all across the nation.
If there has never been an indication that the relationship between law enforcements and the community has been severed, there certainly is now.
Hashtags regarding the police are consistently resulting in the same justifiably frustrated tweets from users who are pointing out instances of police brutality and other injustices that have plagued the Black community.
CNN planned to use the #ASKACOP hashtag to gather questions from viewers for their “Cops Under Fire” program.
The questions they received, however, probably weren’t quite what they had in mind.
“#AskACop Will you be undergoing more training on how to murder innocent black people, I hear there are some still alive? @CNN,” one user tweeted.
Another woman shared images of a wallet and a bottle of medication along with the question “Pop quiz: are these guns? #AskACop.”
Ebony.com’s Jamilah Lemieux posed a math question for the officers.
“#Askacop I have a math question: if 1 Black man has zero guns, zero knives and 2 hands, how many bullets does it take to disarm him,” she tweeted.
Lemieux’s clever tweets were far from over.
“#AskACop why become a cop in a Black neighborhood if you’re afraid of Black people? I’m afraid of ghosts, so you see me being a Ghostbuster,” she asked.
Another user had a question for officers who insisted that New York officer Daniel Pantaleo did not put Staten Island father Eric Garner in a chokehold.
After posting an image of Pantaleo with his arm wrapped around Garner’s neck she wrote, “how is this NOT a chokehold? #AskACop @CNN.”
Other users wanted answers to why young Black men are automatically deemed thugs but white criminals who are armed and dangerous are apprehended alive and believed to be “mentally ill.”
Another tweet asked how quickly Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann is able to speak after the officer claimed he asked 12-year-old Tamir Rice to drop his toy gun three times despite video showing him fatally shooting the young boy only seconds after arriving on the scene.
Not all of the questions were about race either.
One tweet that went viral showed an officer kicking a white woman in the mouth as she sat on the ground in handcuffs.
“Did you ask this handcuffed lady if she wanted to taste your boot before inserting it in her mouth? #AskACop,”the tweet read before garnering more than 1,200 retweets in a matter of minutes.
While these questions were never fielded to the officers on the program, they still, in and of themselves, provided America with an answer to one question – Why do many African-Americans refuse to put their trust in law enforcements?
Here are more responses to CNN’s #ASKACOP campaign:
