Ray Parker Jr. recalls being beaten by Detroit police as a teen: 'The world’s been heating up like this for some time'
excerpts:
Parker recalls being hassled by Detroit cops starting around his preteen years. “That was the reason why I never played basketball. If they caught us playing basketball, they’d take our basketball, hold us up by ankles, take our little 10 cents out of our pockets, take your jelly beans and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “And then they’d smack you around, make you wet your pants. Then the worst part is they’d drive us a mile away from home and drop us off. And then you have to walk back, try to figure out how to get home. They’d scare you half to death. And these are big guys when you’re only 12 years old.”
However, Parker recalls that his “worst beating” happened a couple of years later. “I have no idea why [the police] stopped me. I was just getting on the bus to go to school, and they drew their guns, took me in the alley and that was it. You get a beatdown once they take you in the alley. And they don’t arrest you, they don’t tell you what’s wrong. They just start beating. And I’ve remembered my best friend Nathan, his mother came out on the porch and saved me. She saw what they were doing and she said, ‘What are you doing with him? He’s a good kid!’ And then they just let me go. And that was that.”
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