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Atlanta’s Freaknik festival had already gained national fame by its 14th party. But on April 20, 1997, the dancing, sex, and music was interrupted by a new kind of notoriety: police brutality.
27-year-old father Timmie Sinclair was wading through Freaknik traffic when police stopped him. He said another officer had told him he could pass through the barricade, and that he was rushing to fill a prescription for his 1-year-old daughter.
But that explanation didn’t satisfy the officers, four of them white and one Black – who, by the way, later sexually assaulted multiple women.
Before crowds began to dwindle, hundreds of thousands of Black college students and visitors were coming out for Freaknik. And there were still enough onlookers in 1997 for one to videotape cops drowning Sinclair in pepper spray and then beating him with their batons!
By 1999, police were regularly making hundreds of arrests at Freaknik and issuing thousands of citations. Their true role? To protect white property.
They threatened students and donned riot gear. They didn’t protect Black women from widespread sexual abuse. They continued to harass and profile the partygoers left behind.
The system of policing can’t de-escalate, regulate, or protect Black people at events like Freaknik, or anywhere, because police aren't DESIGNED to do that for us. When we ask for safety, they answer with dehumanization, criminalization and injustice. That’s all they know!