Carissa P.

Olympia, WA

6th of November, 2016

The Next President of the United States

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Next President:

For many years, police brutality has been increasing. People and families have fallen victim to this, including other police who have never committed such a crime. I understand that there are so many other crimes in this world that of much more importance, but please take consideration of the other generations to come. Do you really want to think that if you are a police, you can deal with people as you wish, as long as you say it was self defense? Because right now, that’s what it looks like. There are police that have to show some brutality or a lot because a crime is actually happening, but most of the times now, it is completely unnecessary. That is why I believe that you should focus on police brutality.

The United States has a huge problem with how police are acting towards people of different race. Racial discrimination is what has also been a huge part of police brutality. Whether you're an American citizen or not, people who are either black or Latino have been discriminated. If you were an immigrant or just immigrated here, you’re still discriminated. An incident where I witnessed police brutality was when I was younger, my family and I had been crossing the border from Canada to go back home after visiting relatives. When we had got to the booth to show the officer our nexus card, he had said some rude things to my parents. I believe it was due to how my dad was white and my mom is an Asian immigrant. When he had checked our car, he had slammed down a paper on the dashboard of our car, and quite rudely told us to go to the checking station thing. I don’t quite remember all of it, but I do remember being extremely scared and worried at the time, with both my brother and sister being really young at the time. This wasn’t even the first time my parents have had problems with police in the past. When my mom was going to move over here to when I was a two year old girl that needed to go to the bathroom really badly and the officers wouldn’t let me while they were checking the car. There have been so many times that they have been rude. But this only scratches the surface of police brutality. There are innocent people in our country that have gotten killed or injured, due to police brutality. This has become a major problem in this country that needs to be fixed.

Some ways you could fix the problem is by acknowledging those families that have lost someone to police brutality so violent protests are avoided. By doing this, you would be showing people that you have taken notice in the police brutality and that you are taking action against it. Another solution is to push harder on no police brutality policies. You could try and enforce a law or something that police or police in training that would be forced to prevent police brutality. By using these two solutions, it may be a way to decrease or stop police brutality.

If there is less police brutality, there will be less violent protest and less racial problems than there already are. Police brutality has caused problems that have caused protest for issues like black lives matter. If there is less police brutality, our problem with racism will also go down, or at least people won’t become more active about it. If the USA is free of police brutality, people won’t have to listen about the increasing number of innocent lives that were killed for no specified reason, due to police brutality.

Over the years there has been an increase in police brutality that I believe has been greatly ignored. There have been times when it has acknowledged, but not solved. If you, the president, were to address this growing problem with action, the US would be free of one growing problem. I do hope that you address this problem so there are less problems here in the US and in the world.

Sincerely,

Carissa

Works Cited

Walter, Andrew. “Police Brutality: An Overview.” Points Of View: Police Brutality (2016): 1. Points of View Reference Center. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.