After recent incidents in the news, attacks both now verbal and physical have been put on those individuals who fight to keep us safe in a world drowning in chaos.

First let me begin by saying that I mourn for the families of those individuals who were shot by police officers, but grouping all police officials as racist meatheads is not only untrue but not much different than grouping all women as weak, all Asians as bad drivers and all blacks as criminals.

My brother-in-law has been a cop for years, he is easily one of the most honest, hard-working, caring individuals you would ever have the pleasure to meet. He puts on his uniform every day and goes out to try to make a place that is safer for his daughter to live in and his son to be born into. Senselessly killing random cops isn’t getting any message across, but merely making sure less people such as my brother-in-law return home to their families.

There are bad people in this world, which is a fact that we live with every day. Some hide behind uniforms, some are men, others women, some black, some white, but none of those mentioned are qualifications that make someone a bad human being.

Sure, in the news we are going to hear about a white cop shooting a black man because for centuries our country has been battling racism, but realize that every day cops go out and pull over drunk drivers or take a man into custody before he can lay another hand on his wife and child. These things are happening every single day and they never make the news, but that is merely a cop's job. This is why I believe it is easy to look at an organization and say they are malicious and immoral; but in all honesty, it’s not the world we live in. Cops can’t be our next scapegoats, the next people we point to and say, “there, that’s our problem.”

Stop blaming society for problems; you are society! Don’t wait for all hell to break loose to start fixing an already existing problem. It is time now more than ever to stand together. We are not black vs. white and we are not cop vs. civilian. The sooner the world realizes, this the sooner we can grow as a nation.