On July 22, Gloria Woods, also known as Glorilla, turned herself in to the police, released on a $22,260 bail. Her home in Forsyth County, Georgia, had been robbed, “traumatizing” her loved ones. Although the cops didn’t find the burglars, they did find marijuana, and they arrested Glorilla.
This isn’t the first time police have made a traumatic event even worse. But Forsyth itself has a uniquely terrible history.
Out of its 12,000 residents in 1912, 1,098 were Black. This was less than 100 years after white settlers expelled indigenous Cherokee people. White cops and civilian lynch mobs, deputized under anti-Blackness, pinned two assaults of white women on a handful of young Black men.
All Black residents were under attack. The white mobs fired into and looted their homes, burned their churches, and distributed flyers threatening them. The entire Black population was forced to leave their homes and businesses, fleeing only with what they could carry. To this day, Forsyth cops have a minimal Black population to police. But they still manage a higher killing rate than 67% of sheriff departments, and 77% of all arrests are for “low-level, non-violent offenses” like Woods’.
Within weeks, white civilians and cops made an entire Black population disappear. That history cannot be divorced from how Black people in Forsyth are policed today.