#fix the system

Mother Nature has spoken.

-The Dauntless Manifesto, “Divergent”

I don’t believe the problem is racist or not racist cops. I don’t believe the issue is competent or incompetent cops. I don’t even believe cops are the problem.

I believe the system has gotten LAZY.

What happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbury, as well as other people like Kalief Browder who served three years in Riker’s Island for a crime he didn’t even commit and was never tried for, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, scores of others— this is all a symptom of the fact that we’ve become okay as a society with mediocre people becoming mediocre cops. We’ve allowed the system to slack off when it comes to training police officers, auditing their ethics, studying their psychology, managing their stress, overlooking their blatant cruelty and brushing off their mistakes. We’ve allowed the government(s) we live in to believe that we won’t rise up against them when they make it known to their officers, judges, correctional faculty, etc. that they will get away with it all.

The entire judicial system is corrupt. Everyone scratches each other’s backs and makes things go away, and innocents like these pay the price. Thousands of lives of poor people, people of color, people you know are at risk—not because there are racist cops or severely evil and incompetent men and women putting on the uniform, but because we have allowed the government to think, with our votes and with our dollars, that we’ll allow it to continue.