Black Lives Matter.
Black. Lives. Matter.
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Now that I have given the more vitriolic amongst us more than enough fodder for their daily “anti-political correctness” crusade, I would like to share an experience I had recently.
At my job, I was recently given the opportunity to have a round-table discussion with a high-ranking member of the local police community, focusing on the topics of security and community policing.
While I truly appreciated the opportunity to speak with him, he made known the disdain which he held for the Black Lives Matter movement. Though he never said the movement by name, it was abundantly clear about which movement he was speaking.
When speaking about the role of policing in minority communities, he referenced the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore as proof that the movement was exacerbating the already historically strained ties between these communities and the police. Though he admitted that certain officers — again, he did not say any names — may have been out of line, he made the insinuation that the worst part of it was the pocket of people who decided to loot and riot in the cities. Additionally, he said that the movements were making officers targets as we have seen in the spate of cop shootings.
Finally, he asserted that city officials and the president did not “have the backs” of the officers and opted to “play into politics” instead. After all, most officers are good.
Therein lies the problem.
Statistically, yes, most officers follow the laws and the progression of force when dealing with subjects, and so it is incredibly reductive for people to blame all police officers for the actions of a few.
But why is it that BLM does not receive that same treatment?
There have been thousands of demonstrations by BLM groups across the nation to simply ask for better training for police officers (who are a part of a system which has been disjointed and underfunded since terrorism took over the public sphere in 2001), yet when a few individuals who were acting of their own volition did horrendous things, over 100,000 people came together to have the entire movement labeled as a terrorist organization.
Individuals who use a badge to express their own personal vendettas are no different than people who utilize a national movement to do the same, but in the eyes of many mainstream media outlets, there is no parallel to be drawn. Not all police are bad, but all BLM supporters supposedly are.
This is nothing new in the long list of individual actions that an entire minority/oppressed group is made to answer for: all black people are thugs because of a few gang members, all Muslims are terrorists due to less than a single percent of them, all women who cry rape are probably lying because it happened that one time. I would be remiss if I did not point out the glaring hypocrisy in this dichotomy.
It also means that there is a greater burden of responsibility placed on those who support the movement. It is much more important for us who truly want reform to decry the Micah Johnsons of the world than it is for the police to decry the Jonathan Aleddas of the world, because when an officer uses excessive force it is not indicative of a problem with the greater policing institution, or — in the case of someone like Korryn Gaines or even Tamir Rice — the person who got shot was at least more at fault.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that benefit of the doubt.
