All You Need to Know About Police is in this Photograph

If a picture is worth a thousand words…

Wow. The thumbnail of the article had this Chicago police officer flipping off his middle fingers into a crowd of protesters — protesters who only want basic human decency from a police officers.

Sadly, the uncontrollable rage of a police officer is something a lot of us are familiar with. This man’s gesture is precisely what the problem is with police in America. I don’t know about anyone else, but this photo here tells more than it probably intended.

I always marveled at the systemic racism in American police forces. It would make more sense if institutional racism in police, were tethered to one region. It would make sense if institutional racism in cops were tied to a small area. But this is not the case. Police racism: the brutality, corruption and lack of accountability concerning any slights on black lives ranging from over-policing to state-sanctioned lynchings — spans across the total United States, from the west edge of California (we can count Hawaii, that’s my own personal police terror story) to the eastern edges of Florida and Maine. From the southern edge of Texas to the highest point of Alaska. To a Black American, police brutality is a common practice and is nation wide. There is no escape. All cops function with the same measure of disrespect towards Afro-Americans. This is not conjecture. This is a fact; police function as if they can kill you in plain sight if your black. There’s been nothing done about it until recently.

There is a saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what are the thousands of words communicated by a uniformed professional, who is given the civic responsibility to possibly wield death, giving double middle fingers to unarmed, innocent civilians? To the world?

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