Violent Police reaction to peaceful Protesters (home, to live, office)

[idontknowwhateveryouwant]

To the police officers responding to peaceful protests with violence,

How can you do it? How can you stand there in your uniform, your badge on your chest, your training knowledge, and past experiences at your expense? How can you have taken an oath to protect people, to help bring justice and help others, then stand there with your weapons raised and your armour on and advance forward into people who are equipped with nothing more than a face mask and cardboard signs? How can you stand to live with yourself after hurting innocent people, after traumatizing a child with sights of blood and tears? How can you go home at night to your families, your children, your husbands and wives, your parents and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts, and look them in the eye? How, just how?

How can you do these things, and not feel any guilt, any remorse, anything at all? As a child a was taught that a police officers job was to help people, but how could what your doing be defined as helping? Helping who? Who and what are you really trying to protect if you are okay with going to work to intimidate and terrorize people who are just trying to make use of their voice, who are trying to create a change that is so desperately needed.

What is the reasoning for this? Do you not believe that the problem is real? Do you not care? Do you not want to allow change to happen? Do you not want to change? Are you angry, but you do not know at who or why? Are you intimidated at the fact that so many people are not as afraid of you as you thought they were? As afraid of you as you want them to be? What is your reasoning for this?

Why do you want people to fear you, why do you want to be the one who hurts the very people you are meant to protect? Why are you so caught up in trying to take and maintain control over others, that you have lost control of your own humanity? Why have you started doing things that go against your morals? Why do you think what these people are doing is so wrong?

These people want others to be held accountable for their actions, they want justice, they want a system that is fair, that does not pick and choose over who gets to live or die based on the colour of their skin. They want you, the police officers, to hear them, to hear their cries and their pleas and begging as you attack them with tear gas. They want you to look them in the eye as the equals they are, and to respect them for having the strength and bravery to do what they are doing. Because it is what you are supposed to be doing every day. It is your job to hold people accountable, to keep people safe. But here you are, hurting and harming anyone who is in your way, without worrying about what consequences you will have. You are staring straight at people who have the guts to do your job, except without any training or weapons or tear gas or anything beyond the sound of their own voices, and are penalizing them for it. They are doing the job that you so often stress about before going to bed, the job that exposes you to things you will never un-see and things that are just downright hard to deal with. All those things that you are supposed to do, they are doing. Them, not you.

You are okay with punishing people who have done no wrong, with gearing up and marching into a street like it is a war zone and you are okay to ignore your own responsibilities and your own actions, to fight people who are not too afraid to do the very thing you are trying destroy?

As far as I am concerned, if you can stand there as people stand with signs, as they march or chant or even scream for justice, without doing anything at all but attack them, then you are a criminal. As far as I am concerned, you are a murderer.

Maybe you will argue that you are just doing your jobs, but that’s not an argument. That is an excuse. You are not doing your job, you are defiling the very idea of what it means to be a police officer, you are damning yourself and others to a world where injustice continues to go unobstructed.

Maybe you haven’t killed a person of colour before for no reason other than the colour of their skin. Maybe you have never unfairly treated someone like they were less than you, or forced them to feel endangered by your presence.

But you are the problem. You stand and fight against change, you use brutality against the very thing that is acting to change it. You allow yourself to be a member of a group that hurts individuals for no reason and you allow yourself to be the one aiming that gun with rubber bullets, charging into people, arresting anyone you can catch and watching as people fall.

But I have news for you, yes, you can keep knocking people down, you can keep being violent and aggressive and try to wait for when the people give up. You can try. But it won’t happen. More and more people are standing up against you, and as much as you knock them down, they are still getting back up. They are still fighting. They are fighting with nothing more than sharpie markers and cardboard signs. You will not defeat them.

So until I see you put the weapons down, and stand with your fellow humans as they enact change, and until I see you fulfilling your duty to protect the very people you are currently hurting, you are failing. You are failing.

So I ask you again, how, how can you do these things and still go to bed at night? How do you want to be seen by others around you? Because right now, all I see when I look at you is a big gun and one ****ing lack of compassion.

And you should be ashamed of yourself for that.