November 3rd, 2016

Khalfani Carter

Renton, WA

Dear Next President,

In today’s society, there are many people dying and losing faith in the idea that police are working to serve and protect us due to racial profiling. If we really want to make the U.S. great again we need to deal with the things like this in our country first before we go out and try to deal with other things outside of America. This epidemic has gotten out of control in the last few years with police racially profiling colored people and most of the time killing them for no reason and getting away with it with just basically a paid vacation.

To prove that I’m not just pulling an opinion out of thin air, I have facts to back my thoughts on this issue. One piece of evidence is a stat by Janice Williams “ So far in 2016, there have been 708 documented deaths in police shootings, 173 of which have resulted the deaths of African-Americans.” (ibtimes.com). This show that 173 african american people have died, whether they were innocent or not, the police did not even make an effort to even check if they were or not. Another piece of evidence is that in a 2014 NAACP study, it showed the 72% of all routine traffic stops on an interstate in the Northeast occur with African-American drivers. Almost three fourths of people pulled over are african american. Last but not least, in New York City there was a method called Terry stop or the-stop-question-and-frisk. It’s a method where people are being stopped for suspecting a crime. Large percentage of them are African-Americans. This shows us that people have taken notice of this method and have given it a name rather than trying to put a stop to it.

I can really connect to this issue because I remember back when I was a little kid me and a couple of my friends were riding our bikes from 7/11. The friends I was with were african american and were twins of the church pastor. Anyways we were on our way home from 7/11 when we were stopped by a police officer. The officer told us to stop and started asking questions. He said we fit the description of three little black kids had robbed a store. We had told the officer that we were not the kids he was looking for but hen he continued to make up take off our backpacks and search them. When he was done, he followed us all the way to the house and then questioned the twins’ parents for no reason.

I want our next president (Clinton) to address this issue and not just let this epidemic keep growing. This issue needs to be put to a stop and I feel like if our next president put body cameras on police uniforms and changes the way officers are trained we can stop to racial profiling.

Sincerely,

K J