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While cruising a blog last Friday I heard about the case of Mitrice Richardson, the missing 24-year-old black woman from South Los Angeles who was arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on Sept. 16 for not paying a $89.21 restaurant bill in upscale Malibu. After her arrest, she was released at 1:25 in the morning without her cell phone or her purse and no transportation because the police had impounded her 1990 Honda Civic in which they say she had less than an ounce of marijuana. Her purse and cell phone were in the car with her identification, according to her family, but the police say she had identification. After that, she vanished. With the exception of a few sightings here and there, the 5 ft 5 young woman just disappeared. (Photo from FindMitrice.info.)
I read this story at Field Negro and my comment was simply, "God, this story is horrible!" That's how I get when something really upsets me. I don't know exactly what to say. I go numb, dumb and mute.
This story has so many layers that indicate the police don't always protect and serve. It reminds me how black women are not seen as people to protect, that sometimes not only do the cases of missing black women seem to get less attention from law enforcement and the media but so do their murders. While it appears Mitrice's case is getting more attention than the average missing black woman case receives--perhaps because the police may be culpable should she come to physical harm--I can't help but wonder if this slender woman had been white and blonde, had resembled one of those police officers' daughters or wives, would they have taken better care to protect her? Would they have realized that it would have been better to find some excuse to keep her in the cell than to send her out onto canyon roads with nothing in the wee hours of morning, alone into the dark?
And yet something in me says that had these officers been people of color Mitrice may still have been released to nothingness. It's that image of strong black woman thing, Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman" coming at you from the Twilight Zone. This idea that black women are like strong males, we can pull a plow or fight anything, even wee hour darkness with no phone, the chill of a dark canyon alone with no blanket, coyotes maybe or worse--we can fight a stranger who does not know we too have mothers and fathers who love us.
Another layer: This is not just me as a black woman speaking, wondering about Mitrice and weeping for her, it's me as a mother screaming something is terribly wrong with how Mitrice was handled. As I read the opening of one article on her story by Carla Hall at the L.A. Times, my eyes fill with tears.
Mitrice Richardson is afraid of the dark and always has been, says her mother, Latice Sutton, who remembers that quirk when she thinks about her daughter's release from a jail cell at a Los Angeles County sheriff's substation in Calabasas in the predawn hours of Sept. 17.
Wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt, Richardson, 24, had no car, no cellphone and no purse as she left the station about 1:25 a.m. The nearest Starbucks and fast-food restaurants are about a mile away in a shopping area. Beyond them stretches Las Virgenes Road, which turns into Malibu Canyon Road, winding through Malibu Canyon and emptying onto Pacific Coast Highway near Pepperdine University.
I have a daughter too, one only four years older than Mitrice. She's not afraid of the dark. In fact she walks fearless on the earth like an Amazon warrior, and my fear for her is that she is too sure of herself, not streetwise enough, not as observant as she should be.
I don't want my daughter to be fearful, but I do wish she'd be a little more cautious, and yes, I think, what happened to Mitrice could happen to her. In fact, she walked absent-mindedly out of a restaurant a few months ago after dinner with a group. When the valet went into the restaurant for her to tell her I was waiting outside, she became a little flustered, left and realized after we'd been driving a
