If you were outraged by the publishing of Brock Turner's swim times after he was accused and convicted of rape,

If you were furious when his rape of a young woman was referred to as "twenty minutes of action,"

If you were upset to learn he only served three months of his sixth-month sentence,

Then try to understand why telling stories of Betty Shelby's accomplishments can be seen in poor taste.

The Brock Turner case and conviction brought to the public eye an issue that has long loomed in the shadows of the American Justice System in which rapists get off free or with little punishment after an arduous process on the part of the victim to pursue prosecution. In the Brock Turner case, the judge gave him a lesser sentence so as to preserve his future. Get this, this happens all the time. Here we see a disconnect between the stereotypes in our mind and the actual truth. A rapist is not always a man hiding in the shadows with a knife. It is not always the black guy you see walking down the street late at night. A rapist is someone who forces sex upon you without your consent. A rapist will likely be someone you already know.

Stereotypes are harmful. It is not that a racist joke or sexist comment will hurt someone around you (though it may). It is that somewhere, down the line, there is a decision to be made. So when information is presented that contradicts the preconceived idea of how things ought to be, we rationalize a solution. "He didn't mean it" "She was asking for it" "She shouldn't have been drinking" all translate to "it's not rape because he doesn't look like a racist to me." When you have a society that, brace yourselves, puts white males at the top of the food chain, you have a society that will bend to preserve that stereotype, especially when the ones put in decision-making positions are also white males.

This is why black youth are more likely to be suspended in grade school. Why they are more likely to be tried as adults in juvenile courts. Why they are more likely to be shot for reporting a robbery than the actual robber. Why they are more likely to be shot in any situation involving an officer even when they are unarmed. Why we are more likely to believe the officer over the offender, the rapist over the victim. If the Chelsea bomber can be apprehended alive after a shootout with the law, why are other officers shooting first and asking questions later? Police officers, at the end of the day, are humans with lives and families. I understand that ultimately they want to protect themselves and go home at the end of the day. What is concerning is that there are those who determine a black man is immediately a threat that deserves to die.

The purpose of the police is to protect the citizens. How many have to die at the hands of an officer who "just made a mistake" before we restructure the way we train our officers, the way we hire officers, and the way we think? Regardless of the past, someone should not be able to "accidentally" take a child's father away and leave with a slap on the wrist, when the largest danger was manufactured in their mind.

This keeps happening all over the country because these issues are not unique to Tulsa, or Charlotte, or any city. They stem out of what we as a society determine we can excuse. So we put more bad people in jails and sometimes kill them beforehand, but we don't actually advance. We have a system that most can agree on, is fundamentally broken but is overwhelmingly accepted as if there is nothing we can do to change it.

Racism, in its most prevalent form, is not men wearing white sheets just like rapists are not a man hiding in an alley. Which is why an officer with a good past who makes a terrible decision should face the same scrutiny as a college boy with a similar history.

If we cannot be critical of all aspects of our government, including the judicial system and police force, we run the risk of the infringement of our basic human rights. Criticizing individual actions does not invalidate any past success, but it keeps us from being oppressed.