In the Roc We Should Trust

on 05/19/2015 at 11:39 am

Jay Z freestyling about Freddie Gray and Mike Brown at this weekend’s B Sides Concert

This Monday, trolls on twitter dug their claws into Jay-Z and Beyoncé for quietly bailing out Baltimore protesters who mostly were arrested for disorderly conduct during the Freddie Grey protests. This great move on the part of the entertainment moguls was part of a continual contribution that they’ve been making to #BlackLivesMatter [BLM]. Author, social justice organizer, and award-winning filmmaker, Dream Hampton, tweets,

“Bail for a protester was set at $500,000, while the six “thugs” who killed Freddie Grey were set at $250,000 to $350,000 — which they were able to post for their release — unlike the protester, earlier, who turned himself in.”

As usual, the trolls went in hard calling the protesters, “thugs”, and calling the couple, “anti-white”, but this is not the case. The reason for the Carters donating so much to bail out the protesters was that the bails were set so high that most of them remain in jail due to not being able to post bond.

Baltimore has had this problem of setting bail amounts for a long time but it has been recently explored due to the protests. Bail for a protester was set at $500,000, while the six “thugs” who killed Freddie Grey were set at $250,000 to $350,000 — which they were able to post for their release — unlike the protester, earlier, who turned himself in. Three other thugs police officers who were caught looting in two separate cases had their bail also set at $35,000.

Protestors gather outside the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District police station before a match for Freddie Gray, Saturday, April 25, 2015, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

This is just another serious injustice in our justice system where bail bonds are set as tariffs for our constitutional right of organizing and protesting and feeds into a system that punishes civilians before they even get to trial and overcrowds our jail as these citizens can not afford these bail amounts so they are left there until their trial date. In some cases, charges weren’t even filed for the detained.

As the Washington Post writes, “It’s a familiar story in Baltimore, where 87 percent of inmates at the jail are there pretrial. Twenty-nine percent of those have actually been deemed likely to show up in court. Nationally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 62 percent of the U.S. jail population — there are about 750,000 inmates at any given time — has not been convicted of a crime. Many of them aren’t a danger to society. They just can’t afford to post bail. And those weeks or months of incarceration can wreak havoc on their lives, as jobs are lost, children neglected and cars repossessed.”

If we are going to make a meaningful change like what Jay-Z and Beyoncé are doing then we, like them, have to look at the whole picture and try to stamp out every part of our justice system that inherently protects insiders and the well-off while ignoring the unfortunate and powerless and others who are just caught up in between.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. And follow me on twitter.