With the recent senseless homicide of Philando Castile and his girlfriend's live streaming of his last breaths in Minnesota, it has become overwhelmingly apparent that police brutality is a large problem in the United States that needs to be addressed. It cannot be brushed under the rug like it has been by politicians and other Americans in years past. Passivity is not the answer. People have been shot, choked, and ultimately killed at the hands of the officers of the law whose job is ironically to protect them.
I am not here to say that all cops are bad cops. There are hundreds of thousands of individuals who work hard everyday to ensure the safety and well-being of our country's citizens and visitors, and do not use the power that comes with their badge to kill innocent people. Do not try to tell me Philando Castile was a criminal simply because he had a broken taillight. A broken taillight is punishable by a light fine or a simple verbal warning, not a death sentence like the officer in Falcon Heights decided to give. According to Minnesota law, an inoperable taillight is a misdemeanor crime resulting in a $128 fine. Let me remind you, a misdemeanor does not warrant capital punishment. In fact, the death penalty was abolished in Minnesota in 1911 after the botched execution of William Williams in 1906.
Self defense is not unheard of and yes, it makes sense that if someone who has been pulled over on the street pulls a weapon on an officer, that officer might decide to pull the trigger on their own weapon in a few split-seconds.
However, in yesterday's incident, the man in question, Philando Castile, did not pull a weapon on the officer who pulled him over. Instead Castile warned the officer that he had a concealed pistol but that he was licensed to carry. This action is understandable, considering the recent murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and other people who were shot because they were in possession of a firearm. Occasionally some reaching to their side for their wallet can be confused for reaching for a weapon. While Castile reached for his identification, the officer who pulled him over fired four bullets into his arm. Diamond Reynolds, the victim's girlfriend, caught her exchange with the officer seconds after he shot her boyfriend on video, displaying a blood-soaked Castile laying stiff in the driver's seat. Their four-year-old daughter was sitting in the backseat and ultimately witnessed her father's death.
Reynolds saw the opportunity to broadcast the injustice that many experience and shed some light on the truth behind another police brutality incident. She was polite and cooperative the entire time and captured the hesitance and horror in the officer's voice seconds after he shot Castile.
The question is: was the murder of Philando Castile, along with all the other deaths of blacks in the hands of white police officers across the country that have been heavily covered in the media, racially motivated? There is no clear answer. Historically, blacks have had to regularly hear racial slurs from police officers and been treated unfairly before the Civil Rights Movement and later in the 1990s, as seen in the beating of Rodney King at the hands of police officers who were later charged for his death.
While it is difficult to find a news source with completely unbiased numbers and discern fact from fiction and strategically-misleading statistics, it is important to compare the numbers reported and admit that there is a problem. According to the Washington Post's fatal force database (numbers should not be taken for the absolute truth, rather an estimate based on news reports, public records, and other databases), 990 people were shot dead by police in 2015; 509 so far in 2016. If the trend from last year continues, the number of fatalities at the hands of police officers in 2016 will surpass the total number of the previous year. A project by the Guardian that tracks the number of people killed by police reported similar numbers—566 people have been killed by police in 2016 while over 1,000 were killed in 2015.
According to the numbers provided by the Guardian, 7.27 per million black people were killed by police in 2015, while 2.93 per million white people were killed in that year. 3.23 per million blacks and 1.41 per million whites have been killed in 2016 already.
These numbers can be misleading at first because if someone very quickly looks at the horizontal bar graphs, the graphs are deceiving and it appears a substantially larger number of blacks have been killed by police than whites.
It is when you look at the total number of fatalities that you get a better sense of how many were killed. 581 white people and 306 black people were killed in 2015. 136 black people and 279 white people have been killed so far in 2016. These numbers are very similar to what the Washington Post has reported.
Despite a larger number of white individuals are killed by police, when population is taken into account, black people are killed by police much more often than white people. According to the United States Census Bureau, 77.4 percent of Americans were white in the U.S., while only 13.3 percent were black in 2015. African Americans make up only a small portion of the country, yet per million of blacks in America, more are killed by police compared to the number of whites.
As seen in the war on drugs, there is some kind of racial bias against blacks. African Americans are only slightly more likely to use drugs but are twice as likely to be arrested for drug-related offenses than white Americans. There is an especially great disparity in sentencing on crack cocaine charges. 80% of people sentenced with crack cocaine-related charges in 2002 were black, but whites and hispanics make up 2/3 of crack cocaine users.
This disparity and bias have actually been the reason for many publicized murders of black men recently. The fact is that a larger proportion of the African American population is killed yearly by police than whites (as seen when you compare 7.27 per million blacks to 2.93 per million whites murdered in 2015). If blacks and whites made up an equal percentage of the United States, the numbers would clearly show that African Americans are killed by police more frequently than white Americans.
As police departments continue to implement policies requiring their officers to wear body cameras, they have proven to not always be helpful. This has been seen just this week when Alton Sterling was shot after being pinned to the ground in front of a convenience store where he was allowed to peddle CDs. The officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras but they were dislodged from their bodies and thus are not likely to be used as evidence to prove whether excessive force was used in Sterling's death.
The bottom line is that the number of senseless murders, like Philando Castile's, must decrease. If the government and the American public want to protect their 2nd Amendment right, innocent people cannot continue to be killed because they are carrying a concealed weapon legally.
The number of unarmed individuals who are killed by the police must decrease.
Philando Castile did not deserve to die. His young daughter will live the rest of her life with the memory of her law-abiding father dying in front of her.
The United States needs reform. It will not be easy and an obvious solution is non-existent, but innocent citizens cannot continue to die and criminals must be allowed their Sixth Amendment right to a fair and speedy trial. Unless a police officer is in clear, immediate danger, they are just as much of a criminal as the one they are unjustly shooting (if that person is even a criminal in the first place). The purpose of the law is to protect and serve, though you would not know that looking at some officers today.
