Dear Mr. President,

We need to focus on real issues instead of taking jobs away from people in other countries. We need to focus on preparing police officers to handle situations better in order to decrease the amount of people, mostly black men, killed by cops. We can’t fix this issue without trust between our community and the police. A step in the right direction to help fix this issue can be to stop violence between the police and the community. It’s not a bad idea to bring companies back to the United States, but that shouldn’t be our main focus at this moment. We need to pay attention to what’s going on in our own backyard.

We need to rebuild trust between cops and the community. Killing unarmed men isn’t helping at all. “There have been 708 documented deaths in police shootings, 173 of which have resulted in the deaths of African Americans,” says Janice Williams from I.B. Times. These statistics have created a huge mainstream and the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement. This is because cops are killing a huge amount of unarmed men, mostly black men, and this has destroyed trust between cops and our community.

Fixing this issue can help stop violence between cops and the community. “[Police] often beat up people under arrest, steal from suspects, smash up homes while serving warrants, and use the result of surveillance to turn lovers or family members against each other,” says Chris Osterndorf from Dailydot.com. This is one of the main reason why police officers need more training. In the state of North Carolina a licensed barber gets around 1,528 hours of training meanwhile police officers only get 620 hours. This proves that police officers need more training time because it makes no sense for a barber to have more training than a police officer. A police officer should have more training time because they need to be trained to handle all different kinds of situations in the streets.

Bringing companies back to the U.S. can help our economy issues. I’m not against the idea of bringing companies back to the U.S. to prevent them from making minors work huge amounts of hours and get paid lower than minimum wage. The problem is that we can’t just focus on what’s going on outside the U.S. and ignore what’s happening in our own backyard. We need to make our community safer by stopping violence between cops and the community and the only way to do that is by rebuilding trust. Some ways to do that are by providing police officers with more training, including sensitivity training and training on how to deal with people with mental illnesses. There should also be more recruiting of people from the actual communities that the police work in. This will make it easier for community members to build trust with police if the police officers are from the same community they serve it. There should also be more efforts to employ people of color in the police force.

If we don’t focus on issues going on in our own community then we are going allow these issues to tear us apart. Bringing companies back to the U.S. shouldn’t be our only concern. Maybe focusing on properly training police officers then we might be able to fix the issues in our community.

Sincerely,

Angel Acosta