Ma’Kiah Bryant 16-years-old moved me to write this!

“An act-of-passion crime-or a heat-of-the-moment type argument is not new for police officers and are actually very common. Rarely with these does a police shooting occur. What makes this different from those instances?”

Nia Jovan Andrews

When White people say, nowadays, I can’t imagine how you’re feeling right now as a Black person and mother, I am like you thought hypertension, heart disease and all these illnesses we suffer from are from our bad habits alone. Stress too kills!

This week for me has been exhausting, with sleepless nights, unbalanced emotions, tempering anger and rage, all while feeling a moment of relief with the guilty verdict for George Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin. In that moment of relief, the very moment reports began to come out about a fatal police shooting in Columbus, Ohio. We as a public are not new to this, so I noticed that even with the social media stories, people were not outraged or triggered because it was unbelievable to be in that moment, and it was happening again, but it was.

As someone trained in journalism, I rely on the facts. Let me make this clear! The truth is police officers are using unnecessary force to kill Black people, armed or unarmed. That is the truth! Now the facts…keeping in mind that the facts change. Shortly after we heard about the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Kiah Bryant, we saw a snippet of the video when the police officer fatally shot her four times as she lunged at another female with what appeared to be a knife, but has not been formally identified as a knife, just for the sake of sticking to the facts.

From my perspective, I feel like from what I saw on camera, the cops, in particular, the cop that shot the fatal shots, saw savages. I see kids in a crisis. I know many of you agreed by the comments and the notion that the cop did what he had to do, saw savages. Historically, Black people were considered savages. A savage is a bottom feeder – fierce, violent and unable to control. Suppose one instance justifies killing the savage. The savage deaths will continue to be justified. Check your humanity. You, too, are morally corrupt. I don’t argue with the immoral. Morality is righteous. Righteousness is of God. I said what I said!

I go here because I saw a snippet of a video, but I did not see everything. I did not have all the details. I looked at the video with my experiences. Not as just a spectator with an opinion, but as someone who has a background in producing communications for violent death reporting, what I’ve learned from that is police handle domestic occurrences often where the victim is in rage and from flat-out being tired of abuse or whatever attacks with a weapon…so having an awareness of those types of occurrences give me another perspective. Also, I have experience working in a secondary school where the students had IPs for behavioral issues, so I had to learn restraints in a physical altercation or crisis. One component of that training is restraint if a student attacks another student with a knife or sharp instrument. The police department administered this training I had. So, I am also evaluating what I saw from that perspective keeping in mind that many fight to keep police officers out of school environments because of the excessive force they use on students with behavioral issues. I also worked in behavioral health, so I wondered by seeing how Ma’kiah was running frantically was she in a mental health crisis or breakdown. One more, because I heard that she called 911 for help, I wondered what the dispatcher had known and relayed to the dispatching officers. I wanted to know what information had the officers known before going into the chaos. Dispatchers are trained to obtain information so that the victim is not confused with the attacker(s).

Now, I watch the news, and I heard Don Lemon on CNN say it would be a dereliction of duty for him not to tell the truth. It has been shared across social media that he’s making the case that the officer was justified. I don’t know if I would go as far as saying that, but he is staging the occurrence in that way. Without the facts of this case, you cannot determine the truth. This is under investigation, so the media does not have access to all the facts. To stage it in a way that justifies the killing is out of order for any media personality. All you have to report are the facts. I think Don Lemon should take a break from his role. I say this as someone who has watched him for years. The moment you blame people’s differentiating opinion on their emotions, you are at a place where your ego leads and not your compassion for other’s experiences and understanding. I just had to address that because people will try to tear him down as a Black man on the police side, blah blah, which is stupid. I disagree with him, but I don’t think he’s taking a side. He lacks understanding, is exhausted with the job and doesn’t have any fight him for this battle (if he cares to fight the fight). Time to sit it out! When you submit, it’s time to quit. Police reform is a long process ahead of us. That has to be the overall goal for everyone, REFORM!

Implied word “savage” when the cops say they had no other choice:

“They are words used to justify and affirm the actions of colonial and imperial authority, regardless if these actions be cruel and inhuman, all while implicitly feeding the egos of an uninformed public by demonstrating the superiority of their “state” and “civilization” over all others. In this way, colonization fed public hubris through racism, xenophobia and hierarchy to garner public support.”

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We watched history begin to change while repeating itself all at once. When at war with a system, you never settle or agree. Resist the status quo! The current policing system doesn’t work, period!