Injustice in the system calls for action, attention

They enter the profession knowing that their lives are in danger.
They’ve made a conscious decision to defend and protect the public.
Their lives are on the line every second of every minute when on the clock.
We hear about the memorials being held for them and our hearts ache in sorrow for defenders of our cities.

This isn’t a country that hates cops and prays for their deaths.
But this a country that is tired of seeing civilians murdered for holding plastic guns, merely resisting arrest, sitting in a car drinking iced tea, wearing a hoodie, or just being human.

For being a black human.

While approximately 109 police officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2014 — five in vehicle pursuits, 43 in gunshot fatalities and 61 in other incidents — approximately 400 citizens are killed by police officers annually.

For people, young black men more recently, to feel tyrannized in a nation that pledges liberty and justice for all contends that somewhere along the line, the value of life diminished.

When did it become okay for all of the evidence to be against a cop — the fact that the chokehold was illegal, the fact that it was caught on video, the fact that the coroner ruled it a homicide — yet there isn’t an indictment?

The first step to prosecuting someone was not taken.

A murderer with a uniform walks the streets of New York fooling the world into believing that he is innocent. A murderer wears a protector’s uniform.
The uniform is not tarnished by all cops. To attribute all cops as corrupt is to attribute all blacks as criminals.

However, if all cops are trained the same way, to empty the clip, to shoot to kill rather than shoot to hinder, there’s leeway for any cop to become corrupt.

So whom do we trust?

Whom do we trust to respond to our 911 calls without the mindset of shoot first, ask for forgiveness later?

Whom do we trust will put rationality before nationality?

Does it become up to us to make citizen’s arrests and think before calling?

Or will the way in which police are trained to handle situations be changed so that we can become trusting again in our protectors?

Despite blacks statistically being grouped as more violent, it isn’t a given that all blacks commit crimes. Yet, black teenagers are 2.3 times more likely to be shot by police than white teenagers. Before they commit a crime, they are seen as guilty because of their people’s mistakes. For this reason, young black people, especially males, are taught to tread softly when in the presence of a police officer.

It shouldn’t matter if a person is white, black, orange, or polka dotted.
Veronica VargoIt shouldn’t matter if one group of people has the highest or lowest crime rate. Nor should it matter if one group of people typically lives in a higher class area than another.

People don’t become criminals because of their skin color, their race’s bad deeds, or their economic situation.

People become criminals when they break the law, even when they are the law.
It has been too long since we “overcame” racism for Americans to be chanting “Black Lives Matter” in a supposedly more accepting society.

It has been too long since the Civil Rights movement for police not to be listening.

So march on.

Fight for justice for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and the many others lost at the hands of law enforcement because it’s been too long for us to forget that we are the strength of this nation. That we are the voice and that without us, without the people, the police don’t have anyone to “protect.”

It has been too quiet on the nation’s front.

Let them hear you.

Let them hear us.