Okay, this week I wanted to talk about cops. Not the TV show. The ones that pull us over, make us scared as they drive right behind us, and occasionally have lapses in judgement and shoot innocent people.

So we live in a weird time. Shootings after shootings after shootings. Middle schools, colleges, movie theatres and nightclubs don’t seem to be as safe as we once thought. Then, the people we look to in order to protect the community can often be the hardest ones to trust. I saw a story this morning about a black man caring for an autistic individual at his care facility. The cops showed up, saw a toy train in the hands of the autistic man, and proceeded to shoot his care giver. The kicker? There is a video where you can plainly see the man, Charles Kinsey, lying on the ground with his hands in the air through the entire encounter. They shot him anyway.

Let’s get something clear. Most police officers are good people. They go to work, want to do good in the community, and hope they get home to their families. However, no matter how good of a person they are, the whole law enforcement system is slipping. This is what I mean by the “Real” problem with cops. No matter the profession there will always be the “bad eggs.” Doesn’t matter if you’re an NFL player, a high school teacher, or one of Santa’s elves! There will always be those that just give the rest of us a bad name. The problem is that when a police officer uses excessive force and kills a man who wasn’t resisting arrest, he goes on “administrative leave” and every officer in the precinct sits there and defends them.

Whenever something like this happens nobody gets punished for it and worst of all, the law enforcement community rushes to their side in defense. Peter Rosenberg, a radio show host, I believe said it best: “Police officers never want to say you all do a bad job. That’s the reason the public thinks all of you are bad. Because you will never call someone out and say they murdered someone…” This was in response to a police officer calling in about the Alton Sterling shooting. The sad truth is that he is right! If there is no accountability from within their own system, things like this will keep happening.

Now, I want people who find the time to read this to realize a few things. This article is not meant to devalue cops. It is meant to open the eyes to the issue at hand. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one, and the law enforcement community, needs to be the ones to do it. I believe that this issue will only begin to resolve itself when peers start to step up and say that the excessive force and systemic racism we have seen, is not okay.

With that, however, cops have a right to be more and more afraid of the citizens that they protect, because a select few have decided to lash out in cases like Baton Rouge where three officers did not make it home. They presumably did nothing wrong and were good people doing their job. But someone decided they needed to die because of the uniform they wear.