Police finally force family to remove ‘offensive’ Halloween decoration of lynched Black man
Halloween decoration or depiction of a lynching?
It’s only September but racists are already using Halloween as an excuse to be problematic under the guise of celebrating the holiday.
Wednesday, responding officer had to force a homeowner to remove a Halloween display depicting what is clearly looked like a lynched Black man hanging from a tree
According to Indiana news station NWI Times, neighbors protested and called the police after 15-year-old of Toya Griffin, a resident of Lansing, Ill., discovered a Black mannequin with its hands and ankles tied hanging from a tree near the sidewalk, while she was chatting with her mom on the phone.
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“My daughter suddenly said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and tried to explain what she saw,” Griffin, 37, told Yahoo. She immediately told her daughter to send her a photo and provide the address of the home where the figure was located.
Griffin said she then left a voicemail with the Lansing Police Department AAn officer was later dispatched but didn’t seem sympathetic. to Griffin’s complaint.
“When he called me back, he said, ‘It’s Halloween,’ and he didn’t feel it was offensive,” she recalls.
Taking matters into their own hands, Griffin’s sister visited the tree later that same day while a neighbor recorded the scene on Facebook Live, drawing a crowd of even more upset residents.
“The owner came outside, and my sister asked her, ‘Do you see anything wrong with this?’” says Griffin. “She refused to take it down and said, ‘I have friends who are Black.’”
https://twitter.com/_SJPeace_/status/1045060378378555394
Eventually, police officers arrived, and yet again tried to excuse the lynching portrayal as a harmless Halloween decoration. One officer can even be heard saying on the video, “So, apparently, this had a Jason mask on before and somebody stole it. … It does not sound like there was any ill intent.”
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Neighbors immediately disputed that claim, pointing out the figure had been hanging for four days before the mask was added to make it look like the Jason character.
The officer reiterated his belief that the homeowner did not “mean to be offensive.”
“Everybody is hypersensitive about things, and I believe most people are not going to do that…” he said. However, due to the insistence of the angry mob the officers begrudgingly agreed to remove the figure.
Despite the removal of the figure, Wednesday, the police shared a Facebook post defending their original findings, stating, “Our investigation into this incident revealed no malicious intent and that this was simply a Halloween decoration that had been vandalized.”
But Thornton Fractional High School District 215, which is close to the neighbor’s home, took a stronger stance and sent an email home to parents, calling the image “disturbing” and offering counseling services to students who were traumatized by it.
“It took three phone calls, a crowd of neighbors, and a Facebook Live video before this was removed,” Griffin recounts in disbelief. “The police are supposed to represent the best interests of the community — which consists largely of African-Americans whose ancestors have a history of being lynched. Slavery and racism affect people every day.”
As for Griffin’s daughter, who walks by the house each day, her mother reports that she’ll be taking a different route home.
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