It honestly seems like I hear or read about a police officer shooting involving an unarmed young person every week.
Typically, the young people are male minorities. Are these incidents becoming more frequent or are we just shedding more light on them now due to social media?
I am myself a young black male, and therefore, I fall into the demographic that these incidents are typically focused on.
I will list off the few incidents I have heard of which include Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Vonderrit Myers Jr., and Levar Jones. Levar Jones is alive and the officer who did shoot him has been reprimanded by means of termination as well as arrested.
Have you heard of Dillon Taylor though? Dillon Taylor was an unarmed young white male who was shot by a hispanic officer a few days after Michael Brown. Initial stories claimed it to be a black cop though later statements conclude he was hispanic with original description of “non white” assumed to be black. Some are claiming that the discrepancy in media coverage for Dillon’s death shows a double standard.
To answer the question that I posed early in this piece, I do not think these incident are becoming more frequent, but that there is simply more media coverage now. News networks are not the only ones who cover these stories. There are also bloggers like myself, trolls, and Youtube commentators who do too.
In essence, everyone is everyone’s nosy neighbor and we are all playing telephone. Facts are hard to know without being an official witness yourself since even witnesses often have conflicting stories. I would love to hear your opinions on the following though.
Are these issues based more on race or police corruption?
What can be done in terms of training to make these incidents less frequent? What can we and the rest of society do to stop these incidents from continuing to occur?
Should there be equal coverage of incidents that are reflective or does history give weight to one? And if so does that mean there is no double standard, but simply clout based of off historical incident?
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