For nearly nine minutes a police officer forced the weighed of his body on the neck of a restrained and unarmed black man.
That could have been me.
As the officer stared into the crowd with his hand in his pocket the black man pleaded for oxygen and called for his deceased mother as his face was pressed into the hard pavement.
That could have been me.
Two minutes after the last cry of the black man was heard, the officer removed the burden of his weight from the black mans neck. The black man was pronounced dead.
That could have been me. I am not talking about the black man. I am talking about the police officer. None of us are clean. None of us are innocent. Since the dawn of mankind the ugly gene of cruelty may be inherent in all of us.
Let us pray.
Forgive me but no, that would not have been you.
I understand that the job has frustrations, enormous ones, but the wrong man was in that job. That man had no conscience, no self reflection, and worst of all, he had no empathy. I say empathy because the alternative, applied to the bulk of police officers, is too horrible.
We are seeing a certain type of person exercising almost unlimited power without consequences. As a society, we can’t make that certain type of person ‘care’, but we can and should apply consequences that match the severity of the crime. At the moment there is one law for us, and no law for them.