Dear Mister/Madame President,

Police brutality is a real problem in this country. No matter how much people try to minimize it and make it seem like it is a normal thing, police brutality exists. In 2015 alone, 990 people were killed by police and in 2016, 708 people were murdered by police. Between 2008 and 2012, the FBI documented that 12,765 were killed by the police and a little over half of these people were black men. Many of these people posed no threat to the police and their lives. The police are here to serve and protect, not assault and murder. This country is meant to be the epitome of freedom, yet it is coming closer to a police state in which the police can shoot an innocent person and they will be sent to court and found not guilty. No one is exempt from the law in this country; even you, the president of the “free world” have to abide by a set of laws. If you have to follow laws, so should the police.

As your first acts as president, I, and other people believe that the police need reform. These reforms include a full restructuring of the police. This includes pushing the Department of Justice to heavily regulate how the entire police system works. For example, there could be increased laws and regulations in the hiring of individual police officers. Even more so is the blackballing of people who display racist or violent behaviors, from all police and security positions. By getting these two acts pushed through, it will help weed out the malicious and corrupt cops out from the good cops who are actually serving and protecting the people and not their own interests. There are many things that need to be done to help fix this problem, and while two acts alone will not completely fix the police force, nor will they bring back the lives of all the people they have murdered, these laws will help prevent incidents such as the murder of Alton Sterling, who was selling CDs outside of a store, or Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child, who was shot because his airsoft gun looked like a real weapon. An important fact to note with the Tamir Rice case was that one of the cops, Tamir’s murderer, Officer Timothy Loehmann, was considered emotionally unstable and thus, unfit for duty by the last police department he had worked for. If Loehmann was “blackballed” from all police and security positions, maybe Tamir would still be alive now, in school, building a future for himself; instead, his life was cut short when Loehmann pulled the trigger of his gun and ended Tamir’s life. His life was ended because an emotionally unstable “man” was given a gun and a badge.

Sincerely,

Joseph Gold