Why ‘Black on Black Crime’ Isn’t an Excuse for Police Brutality

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The country is currently in an uproar with a mixture of politicians, celebrities, and people all over the country tweeting about the killing of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police officers, as well as last night’s sniper shootings of police officers in Dallas.

Twitter has been on fire for the past two days, with a mixture of very supportive and very racist and insensitive tweets, proving that race relations are still an issue between black and white Americans. Suffice it to say, being a black person right now is emotionally draining.

There’s one especially maddening excuse for police brutality that we’ve been seeing everywhere. People keep saying that “black on black crime” is behind more deaths than police brutality. They imply that for this reason, people shouldn’t be mad about murders done by the people who are supposed to protect and serve us.

But the issue is that the concept of “black on black crime” is inherently racist. You never hear of Asian on Asian crime, Indian on Indian or even white on white crime, so why is “black on black crime” a thing?

It’s been proven that crime happens most between the members of the same race, the same city, and the same country. People fight, kill, and steal from people based on proximity for the most part, which explains why there is so much crime in highly populated inner city areas. It has nothing to do with black people targeting one another because they’re black, and everything to do with who lives in the same communities.

What really pisses me off about that and #AllLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter is that it’s disrespectful and silences the cries of black Americans. I understand people kill one another due to drugs, gangs, and whatever else the case may be, which is a huge problem, especially in the black community. But our problem is that when a black man kills another black man he goes to jail for life, but when a white man or a police officer does so, society often finds a way to justify it or doesn’t punish a white person the same — or even at all.

A tweet that stood out to me said, “All Lives Matter is like going to the doctor for a broken arm and he says All Bones Matter, like ok that’s fine but right now let’s take care of this broken one.” It is a proven fact that from birth, black people are automatically at a disadvantage to succeed and are punished at higher rates with longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Black people are humans, we have families, we have goals and are trying the best we can in a country that has hated us from the start and has and continues to do everything in its power to keep us down and doesn’t value our lives.

There are tons of videos surfacing where cops detain white men who are threatening to the officers without killing them, but in instance after instance, a black man or women ends up dead in the same scenario. What’s even scarier is that we are lucky to have proof with some being caught on tape, but imagine how many go unreported, unrecorded and unnoticed?

I urge everyone regardless of your race to look into these two cases and help bring justice to minorities in our country. Restore humanity back into American hearts and realize that we have always had a racism issue that won’t change until we decide to take action.

Gimme More POP

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