Walter Scott, gunned down by Officer Michael Slager in South Carolina, over a non-fuctioning brake light.
It seems that everywhere you look, cops are using brutal and fatal force against citizens for the smallest incidents. Something needs to be done about bad cops disregarding basic lawful procedure in order to serve some false sense of justice that they’ve deluded themselves into representing.
I can’t claim to be an expert on how the police work and what needs to change within departments, but it seems like common sense or basic human decency for the men and women in blue charged with protecting people to… actually protect people. Instead, we’ve seen a string of systematic violence from these so-called police go either unpunished or unchecked.
David Pantaleo, the officer who choked out Garner, was found not guilty by a grand jury.
The investigation of the death of Sandra Bland could make it to the grand jury coming up, but it is unclear if the police officers involved with her demise will face reprimand.
And even though Slager’s case is being taken to trial, his colleagues on the North Charleston police force attempted to cover up the act.
Sandra Bland, found dead in her cell after a minor traffic altercation with Waller County police and a promise that she would see them in court.
It takes outrageous protests and further authoritative brutality for anyone to notice that the system is flawed. It’s a tired yet unheard message that cops are in dire need of some sort of rehabilitation to stamp out the blatant racism that has infested many police departments across the country.
“But not all cops are the problem,” you may have heard buzzing around social media. “Some should be punished, but don’t hate on all of them.”
People have responded to efforts for black people in need of protection by insisting the police are the ones that need protecting instead.
“#BlueLivesMatter,” people tag their posts in response to the ongoing “Black Lives Matter” movement. It’s almost as if to say “stop bullying all the cops for doing nothing wrong. I even had a conversation with an individual who told me that “it’s important to remember that it’s just a few bad eggs. It’s wrong to blame all the cops.”
Bad eggs are something you call the class bully in third grade that cheats off of your math test, not the police brutalizing and murdering a specific faction of people for minor infractions.
Eric Garner, restrained and choked out by several NYPD officers, the ultimate culprit drowning out Garner’s “I can’t breathe” with an illegal choke hold.
Is it right to say that every single member of every single police force is at fault for systematic oppression? Honestly and logistically, I don’t think so. By definition, cops are in charge of making regular citizens feel, at least, a little safer when they walk the streets. But it’s high-time they started acting like it.
The goal is not to slam cops for being cops, but to demand that cops know better than to resort to unwarranted violence against specific individuals as they’ve so often done. Trying to protect biased cops from controversy is only giving them excuses to get away with those biases. Saying “not all cops are bad” erases the idea that cops should be blamed at all for their wrongdoings. It spits in the faces of people who want nothing more than to be considered equal. All cops should have examples to look up to so they know treating anybody any less than equal under the law deserves punishment.
Enough cops have gotten away with brutality. Enough lives have been sacrificed for a cause as simple as civil rights. At this point, no cop deserves a free pass. Hatred and violence within our supposed guardians needs to be snuffed out in any way it can, and it can only start by recognizing that cops have a problem.
Comments are closed.