Qualified Immunity: Crimes Against Humanity

The government has granted law enforcement with a license to kill and half of the people don't even know about it.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court introduced qualified immunity in a case Pierson v. Ray, which it was during the height of the civil rights movement and done rationally to protect law enforcement officials from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability. This doctrine protects officials who make reasonable and but mistaken judgements and the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violates the law. In 2005, courts increasingly applied this doctrine to cases involving excessive or deadly force. It has become a failsafe tool to let police brutality to go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights. This is clearly a license to kill or brutally abuse anyone for no apparent reason and we have been seeing this throughout the years against mainly blacks.

One of the bloodiest racial conflicts in U.S. history was called “The Red Summer of 1919” and Elaine, Arkansas was the epicenter of it all known as the Elaine Massacre. White supremacy was very mainstream at this time in the United States and even though blacks were the reason for winning World War there still not treated as equals when they returned home. The massacre started because a sharecropper stood up for his rights (Robert Hill) in 1918 and started a union to represent sharecroppers. That’s when all chaos broke loose. White supremacist felt like it was disrespectful that a black man challenged them, so they felt the need to kill blacks for taking a stand.

A couple of years later another massacre occurred in Tulsa Oklahoma known as the “Black Wall Street Massacre” in 1921. At least 300 blacks were killed and 600 businesses, 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 2 movie theaters, 30 grocery stores, 6 private planes, 1 hospital, one bank and their whole school system was burned down to the ground. And not one white supremacist paid the price or went to jail for this crime. This takes us back to the qualified immunity law that protects not only police but white supremacist also. These are the inhumane crimes that America has committed against black people in America and it’s still going on till this day.

Just recently there has been an incident, were a police officer killed a man named George Floyd for no apparent reason. It was said that he once worked security with the officer. In so many ways this killing could've been done out of spite from something that happened on the job. America looks at these killing like it was the right thing to do and justifiable. The government has given the police the right to kill even though none of these victims were a threat. And if half of America believes that the law is right, then we all are in trouble. There is no justice for blacks in America, and history has proven that time after time and this is why it's important to speak up about injustice. People actually put trust in the lies more than they put trust into what they see with their own eyes. It's time for people to face reality instead of turning a blind eye to what they see. Writer James Baldwin once said, " We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist".