Opinion: No Quiet Time

By Jada Johnson

GSS Correspondent

They enter the profession knowing that their lives will be in danger. They’ve made a conscious decision to defend and protect the public. Their lives are on the line every second of every minute when on the clock. We hear about the memorials being held for them and our hearts ache in sorrow for defenders of our cities. This isn’t a country that hates cops and prays for their deaths. But this a country that is tired of seeing civilians murdered for holding plastic guns, merely resisting arrest, sitting in a car drinking iced tea, wearing a hoodie, or just being human. For being a black human.

While approximately 109 police officers have been killed in the line of duty in 2014 nationwide, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page — five in vehicle pursuits, 43 in gunshot fatalities and 61 in other incidents — approximately 400 citizens are killed by police officers annually. For Americans — and more specifically and recently, young black men — to feel tyrannized in a nation that pledges liberty and justice for all signals that somewhere along the line, America forgot the value of human life.

When did it become okay for a mountain of evidence to rise against a police officer — as it did in the case of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died during a confrontation with New York cops — yet there isn’t an indictment? The fact that the chokehold was illegal, the fact that it was caught on video, the fact that the coroner ruled it a homicide — what do we do now with all that we know? The first step to prosecution was not taken. And without this due process, some will believe that a murderer with the uniform of a police officer walks the streets of New York, fooling the world into believing that he is innocent. A murderer wears a protector’s uniform.

Not every cop tarnishes the uniform. To call all cops brutal or racist is like calling all blacks criminals. However, if all cops are trained to value capturing a suspect over preserving a life — that is, to empty the clip, to shoot to kill rather than shoot to hinder — there’s leeway for any cop to become brutal. Then we can’t be surprised when an encounter between a cop and a young black man ends in tragedy.

So whom do we trust? To respond to our 911 calls without the mindset of shoot first, ask for forgiveness later? To put rationality before nationality? Will it be up to us to make citizen’s arrests and think before calling law enforcement? Or will the way in which police are trained be changed so that we can trust our protectors again?

Despite black males statistically being grouped as more violent, it isn’t a given that all blacks commit crimes. Yet, black teenagers, according to Dr. John R. Lott Jr.’s article on Fox News, are 2.3 times more likely than white teenagers to be shot by police officers. Even before they commit a crime, a young black man can be seen as guilty because of the mistakes that other young black men have made.

For this reason, young black people, especially males, are taught by their parents, their schools and by community leaders to tread softly when in the presence of a police officer. But it shouldn’t matter if a person is white, black, orange, or polka-dotted. It shouldn’t matter if one group of people has the highest or lowest crime rate; nor should it matter if one group of people typically lives in a higher income area than another. People don’t become criminals because of their skin color, the bad deeds of people they resemble, or their economic situation. People become criminals when they break the law. Even when they are the law.

It has been too long since we “overcame” racism for Americans to be chanting “Black Lives Matter” in a supposedly more accepting society. It has been too long since the civil rights movement for police not to be listening. So march on: Fight for justice for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and the many others lost at the hands of law enforcement, because we have been fighting for justice for too long and we can never forget that we are the strength of this nation. That we are the voice, and that without us, without the people, the police don’t have anyone to “protect.”

Now is not a time to be quiet. Let them hear you. Let them hear us.

—Photo by Jamelle Bouie [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons