I support the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and my dad is a police officer. Social media influence and the fragmented hive minds of our country’s populace may have you believe something like that impossible, but as someone who plays a part in the media and who intends to study the representation of police brutality in the media and the interactions of different races with police in the near future, it’s painfully obvious that media and our narrow-minded participation in it is destroying us.
First off, it’s the backward-minded view of other races, mostly blacks, in this nation that leads to some officers making the wrong call. While we have a duty as citizens to comply with police who are trying to protect others, we also have a duty to oust corruption whether we share our opinions in an active way or livestream the aftermath of a police shooting. Attention and discussion is where we start moving forward.
Keeping that in mind, it is also imperative that we help solve the issue and not perpetuate the problems. Instead of sharing an inciteful photo that depressingly declares we cannot call the police for help anymore, we can refuse to generalize an entire population and accept that police forces throughout the country are still here to protect and serve and that a small fraction are like the officers who would gun down an unarmed man running away.
Hypocrisy is off the charts these days, both in our Millennial generation and all across the social media we share our uninformed opinions on. Though there are those who try their best to think of both sides in the police brutality issue, there are still many who cry out that black citizens are being stereotyped as criminals and being gunned down without due process as such, but yet some of those people (of all races) retaliate by generalizing police into a group we can no longer trust.
And yet we wonder why we’re so fragmented in this day and age. We assume that because our neighbor posts about the tragedy of the dead Dallas cops and not Alton Sterling that he is racist or insensitive. Some others believe that those mourning for victims of their skin color who died because of it do not care for police at all. At this point, this editorial is stating obvious problems and hinting at a solution devoid of ignorance, but it’s going to be a lot harder to realistically achieve it and change our mindsets than just sharing something on Twitter.
It’s time we meet in discussion and stand up for good and deplore evil, not divide our nation along racial or career lines exclusively into either of those groups. Advice? Stay calm and collected in the future. Talk about it, stay open-minded and listen to others and act with kindness. If everyone did those things, we surely wouldn’t have as much of this brutality.
