There are no words for how the situations from last week went terribly wrong and ended with 11 cops getting shot after a peaceful protest, five of them dying and two unarmed African Americans getting shot — one after getting stopped for a broken tail light and the other after an arrest for selling CD's outside of a store.
These deaths of both police and civilians break my heart.
According to an investigation from The Guardian, on average African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 are more likely to comprise 15 percent of all deaths logged this year in an ongoing investigation of the use of deadly force by police. The rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher for African American males than for white men of the same age.
In the same piece from The Guardian, Brittany Packnett, an activist and member of the White House taskforce on policing, said the criminal justice system was presenting "no deterrent" to the excessive use of deadly force by police. She used cases like that of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy who was shot while carrying a toy gun, as an example.
Another example is Eric Garner, 43, who died on July 17, 2014 after being confronted by police on Staten Island for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally.
Yet another is Mario Woods, 26, who was shot dead by police in San Francisco. Woods was a suspect in a stabbing and was armed with a knife when police found him, but it was still disturbing to see the cell phone videos of the police confrontation. It seems the situation could have been de-escalated since they already had multiple cops surrounding him.
I got to say, this is one of those moments that you have to realize that this is a high level of mess up. Our system is broken. Some cops act like gangsters instead doing their job as law enforcement or they protect their backs instead admitting that their fellow officer made a mistake. I’m not saying that all cops are bad; there are for sure cops who are the heroes of the community — those people are the real cops.
Like Nakia Jones. You probably know her for her rant video bashing the Baton Rouge police force a couple days after the killing of Alton Sterling. Her words and tone of voice as an officer and as a mother spoke the truth of how this situation could be handled differently.
Officer Mike Meredith was talking with Corey Daniels, who is homeless, in the parking lot near Town and Country Shopping Plaza when he noticed the man's shoes were in tatters. Officer Meredith went into a Payless store and bought him a new pair of shoes.
Or what about Officer Bobby White? He responded to a call about kids who were acting “loudly” outside, but instead of stopping them, Officer White started playing with them.
Good cops do exist.
That is what cops should be doing right now — helping people. They should erase that mentality of danger and paranoia. That is one of the many mistakes of police training. They teach survival to live through the day or in other words “how not get shot if you are a cop 101.” Which by the way, over 200 law enforcement agencies spent on average $200,000 in simulation practices. I know there are training videos of how to de-escalate the situation, and that is part of their policies, but other videos are about how to judge the situation if the subject is dangerous or not. Those are the videos that they need to fix since in most of the videos they show black men with hoodies and guns. That is how racial profiles are created on minorities. The result of teaching those videos is the contrary of what law enforcement might expect.
Most situations escalate quickly, and without warning, the person dies because of a tiny thing and that definitely needs to stop.
It has to stop.
