The Police’s Racist Treatment of Toronto Raptors’ President Masai Ujiri Speaks Volumes

Now, let’s say you were the kind of person who doesn’t always take police statements at face value. You might say, “Huh? One of the most powerful people in professional basketball is punching cops out right after he won the NBA title? Seems fishy to me!” According to most eyewitness accounts at the time, you would have been right. But, even though the county declined to press charges against the advice of the police department, that didn’t stop the County Sheriff’s Office from suing Ujiri, claiming that Strickland was permanently disabled by Ujiri’s brutal storm of martial-arts wizardry. 

And guess what? A whole year-and-a-half later, thanks to bodycam footage released on account of a countersuit filed by Ujiri, it turned out to be total bullshit. 

The footage is undeniable. Ujiri, sporting what is very clearly an extraordinarily expensive, immaculately-tailored suit, is trying to get through to the court and pulling out his credential. Officer Strickland yells, “BACK THE FUCK UP!” in a cop-voice and shoves him, clearly instigating and escalating this interaction that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Ujiri tries to tell the officer that he’s the Raptors’ president and another person with a credential tries to intervene—only to have Strickland shove Ujiri again. As the footage cuts out, Ujiri appears to attempt a shove back because, you know, he’s just been shoved twice and yelled at for no apparent reason, and then click, it’s over. 

Much in the same way our billionaire pal Mark Stevens acted as a living totem of the venomous excesses of his class, so too is Officer Strickland an easy avatar for rank-and-file police officers’ contempt for Black people. There are more hideous examples of random, wanton police misconduct, of course. The names of their victims probably ring through your head even as you read this sentence. But watching this cop get all shove-y with a guy who was two minutes away from talking on national television about the NBA title he just won really drives home something else about police misconduct happening in the name of maintaining order: it’s stupid. 

How long do we have to live in a country where a cop can act like a total asshole to a Black guy in the name of maintaining a secure perimeter around a basketball court (but also because he might be a big ol’ racist) and his employer, taxpayer-funded, goes out of their way to defend him in public, despite bodycam footage that shows him clearly committing malfeasance, even going so far as to claim that he was permanently disabled by two-fisted Street Fighter tactics that were clearly engineered to ruin his life? Shouldn’t this prick lose his job? Or honestly, should he even be doing security courtside at a Warriors’ game? Shouldn’t, say, a security guard who is somewhat familiar with important people he probably shouldn’t yell at and shove be doing this job? 

Also, if this is how he’s reacting to Black guys in beautiful suits, what kind of energy is he bringing to his interactions with Black teenagers? Is this really a guy any taxpayer-funded institution needs to defend? And after they release the footage and everyone sees that their “bad apple” was rotten to the core, do you really need to keep doubling down? 

I live in the Portland metropolitan area, where there has been an ongoing spate of protests regarding policing ever since George Floyd was killed in May. The protesters have pretty simple demands: slash the police budget and use the windfall to fund community-support programs that will allow the city to stop applying policing as a panacea to every social ill they can imagine. Local and, briefly, national police have responded to this pretty reasonable request by tear-gassing, beating, and arresting protesters night after night.