Public outcry has highlighted the issue of racial profiling in a recent event involving unnecessary aggression from police that took place at a pool party in a suburban Texas town called McKinney. While the issue of race in police brutality cases is a very real issue today, that's not what I'm here to talk about. McKinney is not a town where crime has been an ongoing issue, and the neighborhood itself looks like a pretty safe one from the video footage. What I'm trying to say is that this is hardly the setting for officers to be reacting the way they did. In the video, police officers can be seen throwing kids to the ground and even drawing a weapon on them. I don't care if the kids were black, white, blue, green or purple. These aren't hardened, dangerous criminals. They're kids for goodness' sake.
In another case from late January, a 17-year-old girl with history of mental illness was shot and killed by police at the Longview, Texas police station. She was killed during what relatives called "a cry for help." She was killed within 10 minutes of arriving at the station after she allegedly pulled out a knife. After seeing the surveillance footage of the incident, I wonder if police did everything within their power to diffuse the situation before taking the life of Kristiana, a young girl that obviously needed help. Instead of doing everything they could to save her, police felt they had no other choice than to use lethal force. Multiple highly trained officers couldn't disarm a 17-year-old with a knife? Come on.
A case involving a mother commuting on the subway with her kids, while not as severe, serves as another perfect example of an officer escalating the situation much further than it needed to go. A mother and her three young children got pepper sprayed by an officer while trying to board a train at a Manhattan train station. The mother was seen pushing a stroller through a service entrance instead of the turnstile when she caught the attention of a police officer. The officer accused the mother of trying to skip out on a fare and proceeded to pepper spray the mother and her children when she tried to explain herself. The kids went into vomiting fits and one of them even began to choke. It's devastating to think that these kids will likely associate these memories with the sight of a police uniform.
For more detailed data on police aggression, check out a project that The Guardian has started called "The Counted." It's a tool used to track the number of people killed by police in a given year. The data shows that of the 512 people killed by police so far this year, 251 of them were white, 145 were black, and 79 were Hispanic. Ten of them were minors, 447 of them died of gunshot wounds, and 110 of them were unarmed. Of the 110 unarmed victims, 49 of them died of gunshot wounds. That means there have already been 49 instances where an unarmed person couldn't be dealt with in any way other than being shot. How can this be?
I don't want to discount the issue of racial profiling when we talk about police brutality, because it's something that this nation is dealing with every day. But the numbers show that it can happen to anyone, no matter what age or race, and that it's even happening to our kids. Something needs to be done before irreversible damage is done to the reputation of police officers. Children should feel safe around the police, not intimidated and afraid.
