Who Can We Count On?

Sean Bell, Amadu Dialo, Abna Luima, Rodney King, These are just four out of many other victims that have been beaten by cops, often victims of police brutality are people who aren’t Caucasian, African Americans are not the only victims of police brutality young Hispanic/ Latin males as well as females are also victims of being targets so are Asian Americans, and the list goes on.
This has become a major problem in many communities a lot of the time in the Hispanic or African American communities, people tend to not want anything to do with the police officers. Police are often looked at as being the enemy or the oppressor and not the protector, minorities often fear the police thinking that every officer has the intent to frame, harass or assault them. This leads to people feeling that they can’t depend on police when there is a problem and they end up taking the law into their own hands. This relationship doesn’t exactly benefit the police ether because of their negative reputation that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon, officers can’t rely on asking people in the community to step forward and help them clean up the community, when ever some one does it is looked at as “snitching” or helping the enemy. The same way people often hear cops saying that a Hispanic male or African American male “fit “ the description, people within the communities look at cops as being “pigs” or “corrupt”, not all minorities are thugs or drug dealers, or terrorist, and not all cops are corrupt.
Much like innocent people being harassed daily by officers, cops who are actually doing their job and actually want to help and protect the community are gaining bad reputations thanks to the officers that constantly assault and harass people. How can we change this? Well change doesn’t happen over night but the change should start within the training and background checks on these future police officers and current officers should also be evaluated. It isn’t necessary for a trained officer or better yet three trained officers to fire 51 shots at a person. Is this a question of poor training or of character? Cops have a very difficult and stressful job and often have to make decisions that could be life changing in a matter of seconds, both for themselves and the people they are dealing with. But if these cops had better training and better background checks were done then maybe less violence would occur, that maybe asking to much but this is why it has to be a two way street, people within the minority communities should try and not do what the cops are currently doing, and that’s putting just about every single officer in the category of being corrupt and racist. If people continue to think this way then the communities that they live in will never be cleaned up or safe, they will constantly feel the need to watch their backs when it comes to cops and people that are actually harming their neighborhoods.
We will continue to see the same thing happen reports on cops killing an unarmed man or an unarmed women, maybe even kids because they fit the description, each time this happens there’s an uproar in the minority communities and “black leaders” such as Al. Sharpton appear to help raise awareness and march and protest. These protest make the news for about four months, and then suddenly what took place is forgotten about it some how becomes old news no matter how relevant it actually is, cops are suspended sometimes with pay and sometimes with out but the end result is the same they come back on the force and are back harassing, I mean “patrolling” the streets. We can rely on Al Sharpton to help keep this topic in the public light and help organize protest but we cannot rely on him to make the community change, what happens when he dies? Then what? What leaders can we rely on then? We must learn to count on ourselves within the community, to keep the pressure on the police force to change for the better to prevent these shootings from occurring, and we must rely on ourselves to help better the community as well and try and develop some sort of trusting relationship, in order to do that people have to be willing to accept that not every officer is out to do them harm. The older generation is what helped get minorities this far when dealing with the law enforcement, and it is the current generation that must look out for future generations, in hope that they have a better relationship with the law, and rely on themselves now more then ever and not just on a handful of “black leaders” or “Latin/Hispanic leaders”, if we become to reliant on others then once these leaders are gone then just think of how much more harm then good will occur. There will be no one willing to raise these issues and because of that police and law enforcement will continue to abuse their power.