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In the wake of a tragedy for the Black community, whether it be a murder perpetuated by white supremacy at the hands of a “civilian” or the age-old story of police brutality leading to the murder of an (read: another) unarmed Black person, the responses seem to echo a largely tone-deaf sentiment:

“We need more police training and accountability!”

“The police need to be trained for longer and even need hire requirements in order to become police officers!”

“We need a task force that demands and enforces police accountability!”

Stop. I beg of you. Stop. If this is your reaction — you are not listening. There could be 10,000 task forces, a million hours required for a person to become a police officer and a police reform bill that is the “most comprehensive a state has ever seen” and it will not be enough because it is not the individual, it is the system.

The encouragement of further police training is evidence of one of two things:

1.Black people are not worth listening — especially as police brutality is not a new concept; or

2.People really do not understand that from training to practice there is a large gap that can be filled with prejudice, discrimination, profiling and hatred.

Albert Einstein once said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Whether you are for defunding the police or full on abolition, one thing is clear: more training is not cutting it.

When there is more of an emphasis on “military-style training” and less on de-escalation and anti-bias, the problem could not be more glaringly obvious. When elected officials that are “supposed” to represent the people call for a more comprehensive police reform that does not include less reliability on policing as a whole, this can and does lead to the unjustified killing of unarmed Black people in America. So I ask, when we have all the training and no solutions, why do we continue to ask for insanity?

The tumultuous relationship that Black people have with the police is not new. It has been going on since the first “police” were sent to catch runaway enslaved persons. The unarmed killing of Black people did not start with Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, as much as police brutality didn’t begin with Rodney King in the 1990s. Black people are not new to this; we are, unfortunately, true to this, and therein lies the problem: this normalization of Black brutality leads to band-aids, not surgery.

You may be reading this and saying,“Well, since you know everything, what is the answer?” You are still not listening. Putting Epsom salt on the tumor instead of removing it will not cure the cancer. My answer, the answer: less policing – everywhere.

Build up the communities that are damaged and become pleasantly surprised by what happens when you take away the systemic issues that force us to use police as a crutch. But please, stop asking for training for a system that was literally built to subdue a group of people and has simply become a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

We want, we deserve and we expect real justice for all those who never received it, and all those who are still waiting.