How I Stopped Hating the Police: An Unapologetic Special | Unapologetic

i hated police officers i had heard the stories of eric garner of tamir rice of michael brown i watched philando castile get shot and killed by a police officer while sitting in his car with his girlfriend and his four-year-old daughter and it was sold to me as racism it was sold to me by social media by mainstream media by my own mother and as you can imagine i harbored a lot of hate in my heart because of that i joined the black lives matter movement i started organizing in fact i got paid to do it it wasn't until i had my own encounter with a police officer that the ideas that i had been taught started to fall apart i was 16 driving down the road albeit a little bit too fast and i got pulled over this white male police officer walked up to my car and i was shaking and crying before he even made it to the window i rolled the window down and i think he noticed immediately the fear that i had in my eyes and he said to me i'm not here to hurt you i thought one of two things either a i'm being lied to and i've been lied to my entire life or b i just met the one good police officer in america so i decided to do some research i wanted to confirm in my head that yes american police are systemically racist so that this encounter didn't shatter my entire world view but i found evidence to the contrary let's get into it [Applause] [Music] so right out of the gate i want to say this is there a discussion that we should be having about police brutality absolutely my only issue is is that it's not a racialized discussion and we actually harm ourselves in trying to find a solution here when we make it about race now we have to get into the numbers here in 2021 1055 people were shot and killed by police what's more important to note in this statistic is that police annually have nearly 375 million individual encounters that means that on average police encounters end in fatal shootings 0.00028 percent of the time and most of the time when a person is shot and killed by police they are either armed or dangerous in some other fashion now here's where things get complicated i did find that black people are killed at a higher rate than hispanics whites and other races the numbers look a bit like this now and i thought boom got him the police are systemically racist because black people make up 13 of the population the shootings are clearly disproportionate what i failed to take into account in this argument is the rate of criminality in the black community and this is a hard discussion to have because sometimes facts can offend people the more crimes committed the more encounters with police and when we look into the 2019 fbi crime table we find that black people constitute 26.6 of all crime arrests this would go up to 27.1 in 2020. in breaking this down further i found that that includes 51.2 percent of murders and manslaughters 26.7 percent of rapes 52.7 of robberies 33.2 percent of aggravated assaults and 28.8 percent of burglaries the situation gets even more grim when we consider that the majority of these crimes are committed by young black males who constitute roughly 2.8 percent of the population so then i thought okay whatever that's just arrests what if some of those are wrongful it happens all the time especially to black people because the system is racist well let's assume that 50 of those arrests are wrongful and we swipe those underneath the rug the crime rate would still be disproportionate to the size of the black population and i'll say it again the more crimes committed the more encounters with police now if you go and read into these encounters which i did you'll find that most black people fatally shot by police officers are armed and those who aren't are often shot while evading arrest or posing some other threat to the officer now i found that if police officers were truly targeting black people the rates of fatal shooting would look a lot more like the crime rates in black communities and they don't at all in fact i even stumbled on a study out of washington state university that showed that officers were far more hesitant to shoot black suspects than white suspects and when they did shoot black suspects they took longer and they made fewer mistakes the worst part for younger me was not finding that what i was saying was untrue the worst part was actually finding that what i was saying was harmful to the communities that i thought that i was protecting they're the ones who need the police most let's look at la for example just miles away from where i live is southeast la there lies watts one of the most dangerous areas you can live in in california i work personally with police officers who are stationed in these areas i've seen the devastating effects of having under-resourced law enforcement i've seen horrible acts of violence committed to the young people who live in these neighborhoods i've seen children who can't play in their front yards without police present mothers who pour bleach on their front doorstep so that gang members don't hang out outside their yards people who would rather call in sick to work than ask a gang member to move their car out of their lot these are the realities for these communities these low-income communities of colors that we claim to be helping when we push this narrative and if we continue to call for defunding the police and actually see it through these communities will be overrun with crime and there will be no one there to respond to it look at minneapolis look at san francisco two cities who led with the charge of defunding the police but could not handle the spike in crime that came with it now both of them are rolling back and stopping with the defund rhetoric i wonder why and you'll find that most of the people who shout to defund the police narrative will never feel the true weight in the true reality of the situation once that actually happens don't get me wrong the outrage around police brutality in some of these videos is so understandable i felt it i saw it for myself and i thought there was nothing better to do than to go out and protest but before you start making signs and screaming no justice no peace like i had done in the past you have to think about whether or not what you're saying is actually true i encourage you to look into it for yourself but when you do i'm warning you you will find that the police are not systemically racist on top of that the outright intolerance and disrespect that is being thrown towards good police officers is making it so that good men and women no longer want to do the job i want bad police officers to be held accountable just as much as the next person but it's imperative that we cut through our initial emotions to find the actual facts of the matter it's also more important that we question the people who want to convince us of our own victimhood why is it that i was told my entire life that this system of law enforcement is pitted against me yet couldn't find any facts to support it the facts actually lead you to a completely different conclusion that we should have a society that should be supporting its police officers and giving them the resources and training to do what they need to do safely and effectively i don't know about you but i do not want to live in a world without police officers it wasn't always where i stood but it's where i stand now and i won't be apologizing for it [Music] you