:: We’ve turned the people who are supposed to keep us safe into weapons.
I have no reason to fear the police. The modern police was created to keep people who look exactly like me safe from harm. I am a white woman. I am to be, as every male politician is spouting right now in light of Donald Trump’s rampant sexism toward a particular white woman, “cherished.”
But I constantly fear the police. I fear what they will do to the people I love who are not white—my family, and my friends.
I fear what constant fear of policing will do to our society’s fabric. Every day, we watch that fabric tear apart even more, if we know what we are looking for. Some might say, and they’re not wrong, that the fabric is already torn. Only the most gracious of human goodness keeps trying to weave the pieces back together.
And then, bam, those pieces are torn again.
Can’t you see?
I fear the police because I have a mental illness, and although I have never, ever in my life had any sort of, what do people call it? episode, I might need help one day, and the only help that comes for people like me carries a gun.
And that gun-carrying-help has no idea how to deal with people like me.
We’ve turned the people who are supposed to keep us safe into weapons. (Were they ever not?) That hurts us, the people who are in their care. And it also hurts the safe-keepers, who are no longer able to do their jobs without causing pain.
#humanizethepolice
