We told you last week about Tannie “T-Man” Burke. He says that he’s used to being hassled by cops even though he’s never been convicted of a crime. He’s been arrested twice and detained several other times, he believes, simply because he’s a young black man.
“I feel they stop me because they see a black man walking down the street,” he tells Jim Defede. “I don’t know what to say about it. I just feel bad about it. That’s it.”
But his arrest on August 27 seemed particularly cruel and strange. Burke is blind, and after police arrested him on suspicion of marijuana possession they put him in the back of a cop car. They never took him in to be booked, he says, and then dropped him at night in a desolate area nearly a mile from his home and didn’t offer help getting home. Miami New Times has the local angle.