Image via Miami New Times — Former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano pleaded guilty to framing innocent black people.
Village of Biscayne Park / Raimundo Atesiano via LinkedIn
There is a little village called Biscayne Park in Florida and it has only about 3,200 people living within it. What’s remarkable about this little Florida town is the solved crime rate was very stagnant. The new police chief was Raimundo Atesiano and he wanted to impress the town’s officials. His plot to do so has now earned him three years of jail time.
The devious scheme Atesiano came up with was to frame those in the African American community as alleged criminals for burglaries and car thefts. Biscayne is a mostly white community and had been dealing with this types of issues for some time. According to court records and NPR, he “encouraged officers to arrest persons without a legal basis in order to have arrests effectuated.”
Along the road of this plot, Atesiano convinced three of his deputies to go along with him, Charlie Dayoub, Raul Fernandez and Guillermo Ravelo. All of the officers ended up entering guilty pleas, just like former police chief Atesiano.
All of this happened towards the end of 2018, so why bother bring it back up? Because this is common place in the United States. Racial profiling is just the sad norm of life in the US — anyone that denies this is, quite frankly, grossly mistaken. One only needs to sit down and talk to any person of color living in the US to know these racial bias are alive and well.
Just two months ago, a video of an African American man picking up trash outside his house went viral. It went viral because the cops showed up to question why and what this man was doing. The man repeatedly states he lives there, but the cops do not believe him!
Stories like this are all too common. Snap judgements based upon the way a person looks, acts, or sounds can have drastic consequences for all. In a country where we are taught from birth that “All Men Are Created Equal”, one has to wonder when that will become true.
