Imagine yourself driving down the street, doing nothing wrong and then a police officer pulls out behind you and flicks on the lights. You immediately look at your speedometer and see you're going the exact speed limit, yet you're being pulled over anyway. After a few moments pass he approaches your driver's side window and asks you to roll it down.
"I pulled you over because you were going a little fast back there, did you know that?", he asks you.
"No I didn't think I was, I'm sorry if I did." you reply respectfully.
The officer then continues to shine his flashlight into your car; the passenger seat, back seat, and all of the other nooks and crannies his beam can reach.
"Do you got any drugs in the car?" he asks you.
You throw out a half laugh and reply, "Of course not."
He has a mockingly playful tone when he then says, "Come on just tell me where the drug dealers are."
Suddenly the novelty of the situation has gone out the window, and the seriousness has set in.
You reply, almost dumbfounded, "I really don't know what to say. I don't know...I don't know what you want me to tell you."
His face turns emotionless and he then asks, "You mind if I take a look around your car?"
You stare back in shock, running through the options you have in your head.
Finally you reply, "Officer there really isn't anything in here so no, there is no reason for you to search my car."
He continues to stare at you, eyes blocked by his dark sunglasses. He takes your license and registration and runs them in his car. A couple more minutes go by and he returns them to you and tells you to have a nice night. You sit there in your car and catch your breath, and then proceed to drive home.
This situation I just described has happened to me twice, almost word for word, and countless other Americans across the country. Fortunately I am white, and I fully accept that that played a beneficial role in my encounters with the police, and no that doesn't make me feel like any less of a man.
I can't imagine how these encounters would have gone if I weren't white. But that's not the only issue with our criminal justice system. Why aren't we asking ourselves why these situations I described above occur in the first place, to anyone?
People, we live in the United States of America. We are supposed to be a democracy, right? This is the land of the free, right? Not the land of the free sometimes. Not the land of the free when the police allow you to be. No, you are free and innocent until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Well the above scenario is like the picture-perfect example of what happens in a police state.
We should all be outraged by the fact that police have forgotten what their job is. The police are here to protect the rights of the American people, but for the most part they infringe on them.
A police officer's job is not to go out and find every criminal and stop every crime from occurring. The definition of a true a democracy is that stuff slips through the cracks. That's the very minuscule cost of freedom. I know this may be shocking to hear but it's the truth. That drug dealer down the street doesn't need to be caught at the expense of others' rights. That kid driving with weed in his car doesn't need to be found at an unconstitutional police checkpoint. Yet things like this happen everyday.
The police are here to make sure that every citizen is able to live their lives with their right to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, etc., protected. Somewhere along the line this idea became skewed.
The true Black Lives Matter movement isn't just about destroying the systematic racism that is very real and corrupts our criminal justice system, but it's about complete criminal justice reform. This effects each and every one of us. African Americans have taken the forefront and the most severity of this atrocity, but everyone feels it to some degree, no matter race.
Above I said the "true Black Lives Matter movement" because most people don't know what that is. This movement doesn't advocate for the killing of police, and the killing of white people. It advocates for the change that is desperately needed for every one of us.
People often are too quick to attribute the shootings of these innocent police officers to the Black Lives Matter movement when that is just not the case. There will always be radicals and extremists in every movement, this can't be helped. Can we not be so weak and lazy to generalize this on to an entire population though? Can we not take an extra couple minutes to think about a serious situation and come to the conclusion that generalizing accomplishes nothing? This applies to blacks, whites, Muslims, cops, everyone. The actions of a few do not represent the intentions of the many.
That being said, our criminal justice system is in complete disarray. The Department of Justice is investigating police departments around the country and is continually finding systematic racism and police practices that include arresting people and giving out citations for the sole purpose of generating revenue. The true Black Lives Matter movement is trying to change this, to correct it.
Supporting the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't mean you hate cops. You can support both, and you should support both. It's not the fault of the individual officers as it is the system that gave them this militaristic-type mindset and trained them to handle these situations without the correct tools and knowledge. Now don't get me wrong, some of these cases are the result of horrible men who never deserved to wear the badge. I guess you can say I'm just optimistic enough to think that this isn't the case the majority of the time.
Black Lives Matter is about changing all of this so that the police and our criminal justice system once again works for the people. For some reason we still have people that look down on and fight the movement, when the movement is fighting for them.
