Officer shootings of two black men – Alton Sterling was fatally shot outside a convenience store in in Louisiana on Tuesday, and Philando Castile in the passenger seat of his auto – has sparked emotional calls for “something to be done”.
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If his intro calling them a “hate America” group wasn’t enough indication, Bill O’Reilly was clearly teed off at Black Lives Matter tonight and got very confrontational with an NAACP official over the group’s tactics.
It is time for us to unite as Texans, as Americans, to say no more.
“It’s overwhelming to see what we are up against, to live in a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people”, Peter Staley, a white AIDS/HIV activist in New York City, wrote on his Facebook page.
None of this week’s events are easily explained away, but each are informed by a criminal justice system that has an adversarial relationship with many black Americans.
The kind of hatred against white people and police in particular that Johnson displayed has been stoked by the Black Lives Matter movement. Friday was the second day of demonstrations against use of force by police following the fatal shootings of Sterling and of 32-year-old Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota.
Again, none of this justifies the murder of police officers, but it is important to note the grotesque double standard of justice that exists, not just in Texas, but in the nation as a whole. And I think there’s a target on police officer’s backs because of groups like Black Lives Matter that make it seem like all police are against blacks. Shelton objected and said the movement on the whole is mostly peaceful. “And in the days ahead we are going to have to consider those realities as well”. Let’s move beyond a hashtag that has been used to bludgeon and use words that speak life and affirm our equal, and irreplaceable, worth as human beings who happen to be beautifully adorned with different pigmentation. “All I know is that I can’t find a reason to leave, but there is no reason to stay”.
In San Francisco, the police killing of 26-year-old Mario Woods in December sparked months of protests and demands for the ouster of police chief Greg Suhr. “It’s the police officers that are doing it”.
At an outdoor prayer service attended by hundreds of mourners in Dallas on Friday, the city’s mayor, Mike Rawlings, said: “Racial issues continue to divide us”. “One of the things I think we need to focus on is de-escalation”. He was killing them-on just reading from the police commissioner-he wanted to kill officers.
What needs to be confronted is the culture of pervasive racism of the sort promoted by O’Reilly, that we could only wish qualified for the “sub” category. “White people don’t have to worry whether their child will be at the receiving end of a cop’s baton or handgun”.
Tokley, Sr. has been a Florida Department of Law Enforcement police trainer for two decades. My heart goes out to those people’s families who lost loved ones.
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The ambush marks the single biggest loss of life for law enforcement in the United States since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. All I know is that this, this most stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.
