Dear Next President,

You will have no easy task being in office fixing many problems within our nation. There are many issues such as abortion, immigration issues, gun issues, and terrorism that you will be trying to fix. A big problem that I would like to address is police brutality. How can we fix this? Most people think they have the answers, but I am confident I got the answer! I´m going to share my perspective on this situation, and you must read this.

Remember the days of back to decades ago with the Los Angeles Riots and wanting law enforcement reforms? This problem goes way back further to the early 1900’s. Too many times we see a video of a innocent black man getting beaten by an officer. Then afterwards, nothing happens to these police officers! If it was the other way around and a black minority would beat on a police officer, he would most likely face time in jail and be charged with assault. I understand there will always be racism among people, but let’s start to serve justice for the injustice committed by police officers!  The tenth amendment guarantees that no one person is above the law. Why can police officers hurt or kill people because they are racist? It’s their right to not like black people, but it is not their right to hurt an innocent African-American.

According to reports, a Staten Island, NY police officer placed Eric Garner in a chokehold that eventually killed him. This happened in 2014 and drew nationwide attention all over the US. According to Shenequa Golding, the NYPD officer who killed him, Daniel Pantaleo, received a $23,000 raise. The year he killed him, his pay was $76,488 then, after the death, he worked overtime as a plainclothes officer and received $99,915. He received even more, $119,996, when he was moved to desk duty. How could a cop who murdered another human being be ok with this? Justice needs to be served and by giving this man rewards, he will never think it was wrongful to do that.

According to the Guardian, a British National Daily Newspaper, in 2016, 532 people have been killed in a six month period, and all of them were unarmed. These people that were killed were either unarmed, had a mental illness, and/or were people of color. Cops have tasers to subdue them. Why end someone’s life who has already most likely been placed in handcuffs or because of the color of their color of skin? We may not be all the same on the outside, but on the inside we are all human beings created from god and somewhat the same. This isn’t all about race either. People with mental illnesses are being killed as well. These kinds of people don’t respond and they should teach police at the academies how to handle the issue more safely.

Police brutality has led people to start a movement called “Black Lives Matter”. What they do is try to spread the message that more than half the killings are against African-Americans. Their belief is that police are biased towards the color of their skin which makes them a target. According to the people running the Black Lives Matter movement, they state, “we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that has bonded together”. This is saying that they want blacks to feel safe and people to bond together. There are people who feel that there is no such thing as police brutality but obviously they are just blocking out the truth. Police are a symbol of authority, and if they tell someone to go, they go. According to Philip Stinson, only 13 cops have been convicted of crime since 2005. Police officers have killed thousands of innocent people according to multiple sources. Our future is not looking to good if this keeps up. A civil war could potentially breakout between cops and young African-Americans.

Personally, I feel a little bit of the fringes stuck between race. I am a Hispanic seventeen year old who is educated and have high goals for myself. I´m not the only one who feels this way being a different race. There are a lot of Hispanics across the nation who seek to overcome the hump of race by proving the people who view them oddly wrong. Those students across the nation and I should not feel discomfort whenever we want to walk down the street and feel worried a police officer might want to give us a hard time because of our race. I have had something happened to me before. A couple summers ago, my white friend Broderick and I were walking home from darling field from playing basketball. The officer pulled us over because there had been complaints a person was throwing eggs around town. That sounded very foreign to us so we explained we knew nothing about that situation and had not been involved. The cop singled me out because when he saw my i.d., he saw I was Hispanic. He asked me random questions like where am I from, where are my parents from, and where do I live. I saw officer why am I getting questioned like this because I have done nothing wrong and just want to go home. He then proceeded to try and look in my bag. I had nothing bad in it, but I saw what the officer was doing and I wasn´t giving in. I told him I would allow him to look in my bag when he got a warrant. I also told him if he wanted to keep talking to me he could do it with my parents there as well. He then left me and my friend alone but he never questioned my white friend like he questioned me. I knew he had to be a little racist. People should not feel so isolated and fringed into a parallel universe that shouldn't exist.

I strongly suggest that cops should start wearing cameras on their uniforms to video tape every confrontation. Cops do lie and so do people, so the best way to solve this would be with cameras. I also believe police should be trained better at the academies with a better education to handle certain situations for the future. New laws passed by legislature should be set to punish officers who are found guilty of police brutality; they shouldn´t get away with it but should be punished whether it means being laid off or convicted of a crime. Please help people not be scared to roam the streets because of their race or a mental illness.

Sincerely,

Brian