Dear Future President,

A person is slowly walking towards you, they won't listen to anything you say, and are acting in a threatinging matter. They are a suspect in a case, or fit the profile of someone who was reported to have done a crime. You have no way of knowing if they are or are not armed. You have to take action against a potentially dangerous person. You warn them you may have to shoot if they don't listen, and you warn them a second time. After they keep disobeying, you pull the trigger. After searching them you find out you just killed an unarmed person. People will understandably be angry not understanding your situation, but since they didn't get your situation, what right to they have to riot and be mad at cops for killing someone. I'm not saying all cop murders are completely un-biased, but 90% of the time, probably more, it wouldn't matter if that person was black, white, asian, latino, or a blue space alien, you pull that trigger because you are being disobeyed, and threatened, by someone. A problem today though, is that people are rioting and calling for racial injustice, when a black male gets shot, but not so much if a white male does. People need to be more understanding of how hard it probably is to be a cop, and be faced with the decision to shoot, or not to shoot. 99.9% of cops are good people out there to protect you and they don't want to kill anyone. Imagine how bad you would feel though for killing somebody who really didn't need to be killed, but they weren't complying, and they were threatening you. The rest of your life you would go knowing you killed someone. The problem is, that person should have listened to you from the beginning, so it really isn't all your fault. This situation happens to cops daily across the country.

 I believe that there’s a doctrine or belief that cops are biased against African Americans and are more likely to kill an armed, or unarmed, African American male rather than a white male. This belief is perpetuated by the media, and has created two very different sides, both with valid concerns, about cops and bias against African Americans in general. The Daily Wire, a conservative website payed for by Ben Shapiro, collected statistics from The Washington Post cops and shootings, and compiled it into an article called “ 5 Statistics about cops killing”. A valid concern from people that believe some cops are biased against black people, is that out of all fatal cop shootings, around 50% were white and 26% were black people even though only 13% of our population is black, and 60% is white. This makes these statistics more alarming. However, as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, “2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 largest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.” Something I found interesting is that out of all homicides against whites, 12% were police shootings, and out of all black homicides against them, 4% were police shootings. 

 People also say that another important statistic is the amount of unarmed black males that cops are shooting. This is more important in my opinion than just fatal shootings by cops. The posts data does show that unarmed black males are more likely to be shot than unarmed white males, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Here’s an excerpt from the article. “The “unarmed” label is literally accurate, but it frequently fails to convey highly-charged policing situations. In a number of cases, if the victim ended up being unarmed, it was certainly not for lack of trying. At least five black victims had reportedly tried to grab the officer’s gun, or had been beating the cop with his own equipment. Some were shot from an accidental discharge triggered by their own assault on the officer. And two individuals included in the Post’s “unarmed black victims” category were struck by stray bullets aimed at someone else in justified cop shootings. If the victims were not the intended targets, then racism could have played no role in their deaths.” This is an accurate description of a lot of unarmed killings, because if you don’t comply, or you’re threatening the cop there is the potential of getting shot. Also, I don't defend all of the unarmed killings that occur. An extremely small majority of cops have committed racially biased hate crimes, and likewise for movements like BLM, who have had a small minority of people who kill, or a person like in Dallas who killed people.

Part of the reason that blacks are getting fatally shot by cops at an alarming rate, is that a lot of them don’t have a strong family environment, and in specific a father figure. So, it’s not all their fault that it seems like people are biased against them. From birth, some of them are at a disadvantage because they can’t control who gave birth to them, or what home they will grow up in. Using info from Fathers.com, I found that 57.6 of all African American children aren't living with their biological fathers, 31.2 percent of hispanic children aren't, and 20.7 percent of all white children don't either. Studies prove there is a correlation between run ins with the law, and being fatherless or living with a step dad.

So, as our next president what will our country be like? Will it become a more family friendly country with more dads, or will it continue to have less and less kids with dads to teach them the way of the world? Moms have superpowers it feels like, but they can't, and shouldn't, have to be a solo parent. Our country has more racial bias today than it has had in a long time. While your president, will it have less crime and law bias against everyone, or will it continue to be a country where African Americans and cops both feel oppressed by each other, and both groups have small minorities killing people from the other group. If you could solve these two problems, it would solve a lot more too.

Sincerely,

Logan D.