When I was a kid, my brothers and I played “Cowboys and Indians” outdoors with toy guns, and our parents didn’t worry about us being gunned down by a police officer. That has changed. Yesterday, for a Cleveland black family, it changed their lives forever. Their 12-year-old son was gunned down on a playground by a rookie cop who assumed the toy gun he was waving in the air was a threat that warranted taking a child’s life, even though the 911 caller told the police dispatcher that the subject was a juvenile and the gun he was brandishing probably was a fake.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. You can go on the internet and read stories about people being shot by police for (a) reaching into a car to get a driver’s license (because the cop thought he was going for a gun, even though the cop had just asked the victim for his driver’s license), (b) getting out of a car with a walking cane (because the cop thought it was a gun), (c) sitting in their own home with a TV remote control when the cops burst in (because the cop thought the remote control was a gun), etc.
What we have in America today is a boatload of paranoid trigger-happy cops who shoot without thinking. And that’s a serious problem.
It goes beyond cops shooting unarmed citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Plenty of cops are bullies. You can go on the internet and find videos showing cops objecting to being taped and claiming they feel “threatened” by the taping. You also can find videos of cops shooting people’s dogs, even when the cop isn’t at any serious risk of being injured by the dog.
Why are our cops suddenly so damned trigger happy?
I’ve thought about it, and concluded you can’t really attribute a lot of these cop shootings to the heightened state of alert our country is in because of terrorism and the mass shootings that make headlines almost every week it seems. No, something has changed in the psyche of cops that causes them to kill citizens with little or no actual provocation.
In the aftermath of these horrifying police shootings, the story you always get from the cops’ side is they felt they were in danger, and they justify these acts as self-defense. Let’s examine this.
Being a police officer is an inherently dangerous job. Without a doubt, they’re at risk on the streets, and we should appreciate the risks to life and limb they undertake on our behalf. (Same with our troops.) But assuming the risks inherent to their job is part of the job and is what they’re paid for. In other words, if you’re afraid of heights, don’t be a window washer or ironworker; if you’re afraid of fires, don’t be a fireman. If you’re so afraid of a kid waving an object that might be a real gun, but probably isn’t, that you can’t give him the benefit of the doubt long enough to find out because you’re more concerned about saving your own neck — then I submit you shouldn’t be a cop.
We must be able to depend on our police officers to exercise sound judgment in life-and-death situations. Sometimes, to do that, they have to take risks. We expect them to take those risks, not shoot first, and sort it out later. Because once you take a life, you can’t bring it back. We’re all entitled to the benefit of the doubt when we’re doing nothing wrong and our lives are on the line. When we give a cop his badge, we’re not giving him a license to kill us if we happen to look a wee bit frightening to him.
Cops, grow a spine. Think before you act, as the generations of cops who served before you generally did. Yeah, that might put you in danger. But that’s the nature of the work. It’s what you signed up for. Enough of the trigger-happy paranoia already. We, the public, can’t stand to read 
any more stories like this one.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cleveland-boy-12-shot-and-killed-by-police-over-fake-gun/