Ray Parker Jr. knows a thing or two about police brutality. The musician who wrote the original "Ghost Busters" theme song says he was often beaten by the cops as a teen in Detroit and was once held at gunpoint for no reason. Parker elaborated on his experiences in an interview with SiriusXM.
"That was the reason why I never played basketball. If they caught us playing basketball, they’d take our basketball, hold us up by ankles, take our little 10 cents out of our pockets, take your jelly beans and all that kind of stuff," he said, according to Yahoo Entertainment.
"And then they’d smack you around, make you wet your pants. Then the worst part is they’d drive us a mile away from home and drop us off. And then you have to walk back, try to figure out how to get home. They’d scare you half to death. And these are big guys when you’re only 12 years old."
Parker's "worst beating" came a few years later when he was boarding a bus to go to school. The cops pulled him aside, drew their guns and took him into an alley. They did not offer an explanation as to why they had singled him out, he said.
"You get a beatdown once they take you in the alley. And they don’t arrest you, they don’t tell you what’s wrong. They just start beating," he explained.
Parker also said that the protests and riots that erupted in the wake of George Floyd's death have been a long time coming — a prediction he first made nearly two years ago that now features in an upcoming documentary about his career, "Who You Gonna Call?"
"We’re right on the brink of a riot, and I don’t know how they’re going to fix it," Parker recalled saying at the time of filming.
"The world’s been heating up like this for some time. There’s a bunch of crazy people, police shooting at other people and people shooting each other in the back. And I don’t understand," he said.
"I don’t really get why anybody would want to do anything crazy like that. But I guess we live in a crazy world where some people are taught [racism] from their grandparents or their parents, and they can’t let some of this stuff go."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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