Does anyone remember when the lives of every single person mattered?

Before the likes of endless protesters marched the streets of crowded cities, creating traffic and spewing their skewed rhetoric to whoever will listen.

I was too young to remember those days, and it’s hard to believe how cruel the world has become in the meantime. The bad times may have started around 1994, when OJ Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.

It was an absolute frenzy, and in the weeks leading up to the trial it was all but certain that OJ was guilty. And then, the trial happened. Simpson’s lawyers used the racial tension of Los Angeles to tilt the jury to a not-guilty verdict on all counts. The LA Riots had just happened, so painting the LAPD as racist hate mongers was the simple solution.

From that point forward, alleged police brutality has been the scapegoat for several murders. Over the past two decades, civilians choose to label the men and women who risk their lives everyday as “racist” or “abusive.”

No human being is perfect, and there are certainly police officers out there who abuse their power; but, generalizing a group of people is racist and wrong in and of itself. I have the utmost respect for law enforcement, and I refuse to see their names being tarnished for doing their jobs.

For instance, let’s take Ferguson, Missouri. The inhabitants of the town looted and destroyed many small businesses in response to the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson, a white police officer, after an altercation between them. Evidence as well as witness testimony proved that Brown assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting.

It was a tragic event that could easily be categorized as an isolated incident. Unfortunately, many residents of the St. Louis area thought otherwise, and the activist movement Black Lives Matter gained national attention. I respect when a civil rights organization can go about peacefully, although BLM chooses to go about things the wrong way. If you’re going to protest African American homicides, you can’t simply compartmentalize; it’s either the big picture or not at all.

A 2015 statistic showed that 97 percent of black homicides were committed by other black people, two percent by whites, and a mere one percent by police officers. In this case, I find it hard to comprehend why a group as large as BLM would try so hard to end police brutality against blacks when the impact is that microscopic. What did police officers do to deserve that treatment from activist groups?

There needs to be equal treatment of all types of murder and crime; not only is it obtuse of them, but it is morally wrong to target police officers. That goes for the average everyday citizen as well. Police officers are heroes that deserve to be treated with the utmost respect. Does that mean they are all perfect? It does not. But, until an overwhelming amount of law enforcement officials begin rampaging through the citizen population, it’s safe to assume they shouldn’t be feared.