What This Black Father WON'T Teach His Children About the Police

It might come as a shock to some that not all black men believe the police are out to get them for being black, or that their parents teach them this. 

Young black men commit violent crimes disproportionate to their numbers in the U.S. population, and, naturally, draw more of law enforcement’s attention. Liberal politicians, however, with a complicit leftist media, know how to hype up incidents where a white police officer kills a black man. They focus on anomalies and predictably ignore what young black men do to each other every week. 

But married father-of-two Isaac J. Bailey wrote in Politico that he won’t be having the fear-the-police talk with his children. An excerpt:

It is because of my history—the pain I have suffered and also the pain that I have not—that I won’t be making any special effort to tell my son, or daughter, to be wary of white cops, or any cops. I don’t want them living their lives with preconceived notions about how dangerous the world will be for them. I don’t want them carrying unnecessary, misguided burdens the way I did. Trying to get them to become mature young people in a world that doesn’t quite seem to understand what it wants to be—or them to be—is burden enough.

I also don’t want them stereotyping white cops the way too many young black boys are stereotyped. I don’t want false, negative images about cops unintentionally affecting their behavior during stressful encounters with police officers, perhaps leading to fearful, reflexive actions on their part that could turn a routine traffic stop deadly.

Bailey doesn’t want to teach his children that cops are always right, either.

But just as important, we must also teach them to respect themselves. I want my son, and daughter, to know that they can civilly question an unlawful order by a police officer. I want them to understand that they don’t have to consent to baseless searches, that they should not answer questions without a lawyer or their parents present, given what we know about the abuses in the system.

We ostensibly don’t live under a tyrannous state where we can’t even question the police. The important thing people should teach their children is not to resist arrest even if they believe it’s unlawful. The matter can be straightened out at the police station, not in the field, where the police officer can’t assume they don’t pose a threat to his safety.

Photo credit: The All-Nite Images (Creative Commons) – Some Rights Reserved