Police Shooting Victims Similarity

Of course every incident is different, but I keep seeing a common theme in police shootings of unarmed people. The people who get shot don’t seem to be following directions. Despite the continued push to make us believe that only Black men are shot by police, killedbypolice.net says otherwise. What I see in most of the posted videos, is police with guns drawn; and the person who gets shot not getting down on the ground with their hands in the air. Instead, they seem to be continuing to move toward some other objective.

If someone pulled a gun on me, I would try to run away; unless I knew it was a police officer. Then I would be very careful to follow directions to avoid agitating the officer pointing the gun at me!

But from my work in county social services and also in schools, I learned that there are people in our society who do not think that anyone can make them do anything and they persist in that belief regardless of the outcome. In fact, life has become so cheap in some communities, that some people don’t seem to care one way or the other if they kill someone or die themselves.

So the protesters are not going to solve this. Looting and burning adds fuel to the controversy—as do the people who act like this is strictly a racial thing. It isn’t. Most of America does not care what color you are if you have lots of money. In order to get money, you need to learn how to follow rules, work hard and get a good education. There are certain communities who have not yet "bought in" to these ideals; and so they can never get ahead. I believe, it is these same groups that cannot follow directives from authority figures—even if a gun is being pointed at them at the time.

So the yelling and the protests are merely an undisciplined reaction to a larger problem that is almost completely being ignored. As I have said before, if Black lives really matter, then someone should try to address the statistically much higher number of Black deaths caused by other African-Americans. So much effort is going into reacting to police shootings and almost none goes to address the real issues. The irony and the tragedy is that this direction will only make things worse until people learn to accept the truth and invest in real solutions.

—KJC