His family members are victims, too. And while I agree that the chance of him being framed is extremely unlikely, CL's relatives are familiar in a way we are not with one of the country's most notoriously racist and corrupt police departments. They have experiences we do not.
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I agree that his family members are victims, we judge them for what they are saying when we are not in their shoes. Now, I don't think I would ever do what they are doing if I was God forbid, in their place, but at the end of the day nobody knows how they would react unless they were in that situation themselves.
As for the racism that exists in the police department, I agree, I have seen instances of it myself in this neighborhood. But I don't believe that means that every single law enforcement officer is a racist looking for someone to frame, because I have also seen good things from police in this neighborhood. Did his parents have bad experiences with police? Maybe they have, but their son was never arrested before, only given summonses, so I don't know how bad that experience would be considered.
Another thing I wanted to touch on: in my opinion certain terms can have racist connotations, (terms like "you people", "these people" or "those people" ) when used in a certain context. For example, if an Asian guy was robbed by a Muslim guy and the Asian guy stated something like "he stole my money, why are you surprised? That's what these people do." I would take that statement as meaning that's what Muslims do, they rob people.
ENY and Brownsville are both predominantly black areas. There are also many West Indians in these areas as well. Lots of West Indians do not like Black Americans. They call them lazy and entitled and look down on them in general. CL's dad in early interviews made this statement: “He has never done anything — nothing in his whole life,” Richard Lewis said. “He wouldn’t have done it, because
we live in an area where these people do a lot of things — a lot of hurt — and try to push it on other people, and he wouldn’t have.”
I immediately took this statement as being derogatory to the Black American residents in their neighborhood. Basically saying that "these people" are the real bad guys, and his son is not one of them. The Lewis family is using race to say that their son was framed, but they were the only ones to show any kind of racism toward anyone imo.