The debate and pitch of democracy that has sprung amongst our generation from the gruesome killings of black Americans, by the police force, has now taken an uncontrollable turn for the worst.
Our opinions have become so strong that we can wear it on t-shirts or start hashtags about it, but there still seems to be no room for change. The lives are still being lost, and the lines are still being blurred. The facts are real, and they state that yet another man has lost his life, and no one seems to really know why. The media is notorious for digging deep and piling up headlines bias to a specific persona. The bike the man stole when he was twelve soon turns into “criminal activity”, and soon enough, the name is now just another hashtag.
Our justice system is theoretically supposed to be black and white, but ironically, that seems to be the biggest issue. Social media has given society a new perspective on our seemingly corrupted justice system, as we can see it all unfold at the palm of our hands.
The world saw the video of 37-year-old Alton Sterling being shot by two white officers in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge, where he regularly sold homemade music CDs from a folding table. The blurry camera footage is not completely clear to depict whether or not Sterling had a gun in his hand or pocket when he was shot, however, witnesses claim that they saw police pull the gun from Sterlings’ pocket after he was shot. The shooting shocked many, and started angry protests in Louisiana, as members of the community called for an outside investigation. The video is disturbing to say the least, and the careless nature of a firearm is merely revolting. The type of the weapon is irrelevant when the world can see that the man was not using it to resist arrest, and that he was pinned to the ground. There is a lot we all don’t understand, but what we see is murder. No struggle, no shots fired back and forth, just murder.
“He had a gun!” but so do one in three of every American. The cops bought Dylann Roof Burger King hours after Charleston shooting. This man gunned down nine people inside a historic black church in South Carolina, and was polite and quiet enough while in police custody do deserve an incident-free arrest, catered with fast-food and a bullet-proof vest. Brock Turner was sentenced to six months in jail after he raped an unconscious woman last year, and granted probation. It is completely politically incorrect to state that they are both white, but these days, being politically correct seems to be nothing but a barricade from the truth.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Another name on the incomplete list of blacks killed by police and law enforcement in the US. US police kill on average about two unarmed Black people every week, according to a study by The Guardian. That means over 5,000 people from 1964-2014, and that list is still incomplete. The same study finds that 102 people were killed by police so far this year were unarmed, and that agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the US government. Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people, according to another investigation, which found 102 of 464 people killed so far this year in incidents with law enforcements were not carrying weapons. These statistics include deaths after the police use of a Taser, deaths caused by police vehicles and deaths following altercations within custody. That doesn’t even include open fire.
Why is it you’re twice as likely to be shot if you’re an unarmed black male? This speaks volumes and is frequently brushed under the rug. No one seems to fathom such disparity, or can get to the bottom of this. The US government’s record, which is ran by the FBI counted 461 “justifiable homicides” in 2013, which is the latest year that official data is available. 408 of those deaths recorded were caused by gunshot. Police killed 27 of those people after a Taser was deployed.
Society shouldn’t have to take concrete steps to end police brutality and racial profiling. Our justice system should not broadcast fear and terror to the people of the world, let alone the US. Safety clashes to closely with civil rights in a decade that is supposed to be perceived as modern and better than ever. Watching a man be murdered on Twitter, as if it were a clip from a movie, is beyond anything that we have seen, but seems to be the only way that we can all be informed. The reaction to these situations is explosive and powerful, but has not transitioned into anything remotely in the nature of change. These people involved in this murder have taken away a man with children who depend on their father on a daily basis, and these people are the same people who provide us with security. We blame the guns, but our society is so engulfed with violence that the only rationality that comes from acts of injustice are not the guns themselves, but the people operating them. A great man once said, “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” That man was then shot and murdered. Who do we call when we fear both cops and robbers?
Resources: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/black-americans-killed-by-police-analysis
