Within the past week, it seems that our country has turned into complete chaos. We are divided by one thing: whose lives are of higher value. In all reality, every single life matters equally, despite race or occupation. Because of this fact, the debate that is occurring within our nation is irrelevant.
My personal opinion is that policemen are always operating under the constraint of one of two things: protection of citizens or fear for his/her life. The time that a police officer has to decide whether to shoot or not is limited. Although there may be some police officers that act unjustly and abuse their power, I personally believe that majority of the officers are noble and do their best to maintain order within our society. I mean, after all, there are only an average of 400 people killed by law enforcement per year, and only about 32 percent of those people are African American, according to Subject Politics.
Like I said before, there are probably officers within law enforcement that do act unjustly. However, say that there are a number of unjust officers, the assumption that all law enforcement is evil is a logical fallacy. In fact, the assumption that all law enforcement is evil, because there are some officers that are bad, is the same foundational ideas that are found behind racism. In simpler terms, just because one egg is spoiled does not mean that all of the eggs in the dozen are spoiled as well. Again, these beliefs are a form of racism.
Regardless if the cop who shot Mr. Sterling was in the wrong or not, taking the lives of ten other officers who were innocent did not accomplish anything. The only people that are aware of what occurred on the scene of Mr. Sterling's are the police officer and Mr. Sterling. We are all basing our opinions on 30 seconds worth of footage, when there was probably more like 30 minutes worth of interaction between the officer and Alton. The 10 officers that were killed were killed out of hate. The Black Lives Matter campaign is supporting the fight against what they believe to hate with, well, more hate. In the words of MLK, hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
