A couple of weeks ago, Addie Greene blurted out some words that weren’t very wise. Frustration has a way of making us do that sometimes.

Like many of her black constituents, Greene, a member of the Palm Beach County Commission in Palm Beach County, Fla., was livid when a grand jury decided not to indict a Delray Beach police officer for fatally shooting a 16-year-old when he drove off in a Cadillac after refusing to show the officer a driver’s license. The officer, Darren Cogoni, is white. The teenager, Jerrod Miller, was black.

Predictably, the decision angered many who believed that the teenager’s impulsiveness and lack of a license didn’t merit a death penalty. And Greene was so angry that she told the media that if a black male is confronted by a police officer, he should head towards a big crowd of people, or else he’ll be killed.

That advice wouldn’t have worked for Miller. According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the teenager was already among a crowd when Cogoni stopped him as he was driving the car down a school breezeway. But while Miller’s actions were foolish, Cogoni’s reaction was far worse.

Remember, Miller was the child here.

I believe that’s the thought that consumed Greene when she implied that for black men, a mere exchange of words with the cops can put them in a life-or-death situation. Unfortunately, though, the police in Palm Beach County aren’t focusing on changing that perception. They are focusing on forcing Greene out of office. Like many other powerful, mostly-white groups in the age of Dubya; they have turned another black person’s racial frustration into fodder for their perceived racial victimization -- no matter that a black teenager is the only one who wound up dead here.

No matter that Greene’s frustration comes from a very real place -- a place that the Bush administration apparently doesn’t want anyone to see.

Recently, Lawrence A. Greenfeld, who headed the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, was demoted for refusing to comply with the Bushies in an attempt to delete information in a press release about what happens to blacks and Hispanic drivers when they come in contact with the police.

An April study by the bureau found that while black and Hispanic drivers were stopped about as much as white drivers, once stopped they were disproportionately more likely to be searched, subjected to force or the threat of force, or issued a ticket. The authors of the study told The New York Times that the gaps were notable, with evidence showing that black drivers were having the worse experiences.

I can believe that.

Back in 1989, I was driving behind a white police officer in Jacksonville -- being careful not to break the speed limit -- when suddenly, the cop pulled his car off the road. I thought he was headed off on an emergency call until he drove up behind me and put his lights on. When I drove to a side street to stop, he yelled and screamed at me when I dared question why he’d stopped me.

After thinking about it for five minutes, he decided that he had stopped me for following him too closely. I wasn’t. And even if I was, it’s a violation that, in the absence of an accident, usually merits a warning rather than a ticket. So I disagreed with the cop. Then he yelled some more and smugly dared me to challenge my ticket in traffic court. I did -- and it was thrown out.

But that experience, while being far from a life-and-death one, still gives me shivers, mainly because it made me painfully aware of how powerless a person is if he or she is confronted by a nasty cop or a trigger-happy one. And statistics such as the ones amassed by the bureau -- information that was scribbled over with the words, “Do we really need this?”  -- make me cringe. They make me cringe because what they reveal is that for black people, that unfairness is more reality than perception.

Maybe that was the reality that sparked Greene’s reaction.

Now, I know that Miller’s situation was vastly different from mine. He was breaking the law and refusing to comply with the police. I wasn’t. But then again, he was only 16. And I can’t help but wonder whether if Miller was white, the police officer would have handled him more as a youthful prankster than as a budding sociopath.
 
That’s why I believe that while Greene’s words weren’t helpful, the challenge is to look beyond the words and at the pent-up aggravation that prompted them. The real problem doesn’t lie with black people like her. It lies with the fact that for whatever reason, black people -- even law-abiding black people like me -- receive rougher treatment at the hands of the police than do white people. And even if you don’t wind up dead from it, as Miller did, you still never forget it, as I haven’t. That a reality that Greene’s resignation -- or Greenfeld’s demotion -- won’t change.

No matter how hard some people try to cover it up.