Dear, Mr. or Ms. President

The topic I chose to write about to you today is “Black Lives Matter.” I chose this topic because many African Americans are dying at higher rates by police officers more so than any other minority. The thing is many of them who’ve passed are innocent and have left behind their families and friends due to uncalled for actions. How would you feel if your family member was innocent and this happen to them? Or you might ask how do you know if they were guilty or not? So I propose that we come together as one and be united. Once we are united and strong we have to give ideas on how to improve law enforcement, enforce tougher laws against police officers and more. I believe in order to reduce and eventually eliminate this problem unity and belief in each other is the right move.

Before I say anything though, I want to address that this does not pertain to all the police officers in the United States. There are some men and women who put their lives on the line every day and they’re as selfless and as courageous you can get. I’d like to thank them for their service and I’m grateful to have them protect me day in and day out. This is directed to a small amount of police officers that use their power to demean and attack African Americans.

I believe in order to stop the killings of African Americans by police officers we have to come together and hand out punishments to police officers to show that their actions have to be called for and accounted for. In order to hand out the right punishments we have to give the court usable and great evidence to show what the officers have done. It’s true that some actions have to result in deaths because the officers had to defend themselves. Or sometimes there’s enough evidence to justify that the officer/s were guilty. Although that might be the case for some in reality many of the deaths did not end up like how I described because more so than not the evidence is there and you just have to make the right verdict.

An example I have for statistics is appalling, one is “The United States police have killed at least 194 black people in 2016. The rates are for every million people and for black people it’s 4.86 on average and 1.95 for white people” (Craven). This piece of evidence shows that there has to be a problem because statistically it’s not justifiable that black people are dying 2x more than white people. Another jaw dropping piece of evidence is “Based on the Guardians data, black males between the ages of 15-34 are nine times more likely to be killed than any other demographic” (Craven). I just don’t understand this because why black people are targeted so much more than anyone else. Do they do bad things or are their prejudice toward blacks? I believe it’s a mixture of both because how would they get in that position but also why would you kill an innocent man without knowing or feeling something. My last piece of evidence is “White people take up 62% of the population. And those who are shot by police officers are 49% of the time white. While black people take up 13% of population and they account for% of those shot by police” Just think of it like this, if Black people took up 62% of the population 90% or more would be shot by police while white people would take 13% and only under 10% would be shot by police. This shows that there are some issues and there is prejudice towards black people. In the end it shows there are problems in society for African Americans when it has to do with law enforcement.

In the end with all this evidence I believe that black people are being judged and that is costing those lives and heavy losses towards family and friends. They are the highest statistically killed minority and we need to come together to stop innocent lives being lost once and for all. I believe in order to put an end to this, we have to be able to come together no matter the skin color or ethnicity. Once we come together we have to share the facts and enforce severe punishments to officers who abuse their  powers. 

Sincerely,

Kenny N