How many more?

I seriously want to know.

Why is seemingly everyday another innocent black person gets murdered by the police. What is going on in this world? Have we lost all morals and ethics? Do people not care? Why is racism so rampant within the police department? Why do they have access to guns but no training in how to deal with people using words? I'm sick of this all. I am also scared. I do not know where we go as a society from here. The last administration made these racist police officers feel that they could go out and literally get away with murder. And now that we have a competent president and vice president, anytime they want to pass legislation to make it much harder to acquire guns, and to allocate more money for other parts of society than just the police, the GOP sits on its hands, or votes it down.

The fact is that Daunte Wright should be alive today. He should not be dead. His family should not be making arrangements for a funeral. His son should be seeing his father right now. He should be waking up next to his girlfriend and getting ready to talk to his folks. He isn't because some racist police officers saw a "traffic violation", and then saw him on his phone, and when he went to get out of his car, he was shot dead. This is sickening and worrisome. I want to know what this so-called "traffic violation" was, and why it was deemed serious enough to get a gun out. And I do not care if he was running away from the police. I feel like everyone should be running from the police right now with the way they have acted since the last administration. Derek Chauvin is currently on trial for the murder of George Floyd. Floyd used a counterfeit bill and this monstrous police officer decided he needed to put his knee to his neck for over 8 minutes and squeeze the life out of him. If Chauvin is not convicted of the murder he knowingly did, there will be riots. Wright was murdered by a different police officer not too far from where this trial is happening. And no one seems to be talking about it as much as they should right now.

I get worried every morning when I wake up and check the news because something horrible like this seems to happen everyday, and the people who commit these heinous acts, these crimes, seem to face little to no punishment. I saw today that the police department that is responsible for the police officer that murdered Wright said "we were supposed to taser him". Explain to me how you mix up a taser with a handgun. I haven't held either, but I have seen many, many pictures of both, and I know the difference between the two. This is a very scary time to be alive, and excuses like this are adding to the fear. It just came across my phone that they have postponed a baseball game that was supposed to happen in Minnesota this afternoon. That was the right call. Things like this cannot just continue to happen and we all just move on as a society. Consequences have to be paid. The punishment needs to fit the crime. The people who shoot to kill need to be held responsible and be prosecuted. I cannot take it anymore.

And it will happen again. That is what makes this even worse. Any of us who may have thought that George Floyd's death was going to be a wake up call, was going to change things, clearly we were wrong. Nothing has changed from the police's perspective. I'm sure there are still some decent police officers, but that wanes every time I see another story like Daunte Wright's. Police officers are given too much power, and I feel the good majority of them abuse it. I feel like a lot of officers were the "cool" guys and girls in high school, and it all stopped there. So they have to find a way to stay relevant, to still be deemed "cool", so they go out and find a job where they can have a miniscule amount of power, and then abuse it. There have been far, far too many deaths that could have easily been avoided. We also have traffic stops that, if they do not end in death, they still end pretty awfully. This past December there were two cops who openly harassed an Army veteran because he is black. They yelled at him, threatened his career and pepper sprayed him even though he was following their directions to a T. The video is only coming out now because the veteran rightfully pressed charges. Those officers need to be excused of their duties and rightly prosecuted as well. But with Wright and the police involved, this is clearly premeditated murder, at least from my perspective. They found a bogus reason to pull him over, and when he made a movement, the police fired their weapons in cold blood. This shit needs to end.

I say again, Wright should be alive today. So should George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Hamidou Diallo and Michael Brown and Philando Castile and Eric Garner and Botham Jean and Tamir Rice and so, so , so many more people of color that were murdered because they are not white. I have said it before and I will say it again, I am scared. I do not want to be pulled over by any officer. I am scared of what they will do to me and my wife and my kids. And I am a white male in my late 30's. I cannot imagine what my friends who are minorities think whenever they see a police officer, especially with how blood thirsty they have become over these past four years. I am also finding it harder and harder to not tell my children my true feelings about the police. This is another dark day in a very dark time. Something needs to be done. Something big needs to happen. And these monsters that are shooting people in cold blood, they need to be held accountable for their acts. BLACK LIVES MATTER.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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