Dr Flavius Akerele III's The E Team Education blog

Policemen need to be perfect; this is a simple truth. Imperfection in a job that can cost people their lives, has no place. Sorry but that is absolute the truth, so if you are not hiring the best educated, the most honest people, you are doing society a disservice. If you are not instilling the “civil service” part and the “public safety” part, you are being criminal. An airline pilot that accidentally crashes planes will not be a pilot for long, a doctor or nurse that accidentally kills patients will probably be prosecuted and certainly sued. Heck, teaching is a profession where we acknowledge and embrace mistakes, teachers get vilified, hounded, sued, and prosecuted for things that would not make the news if they were not teachers. Bus drivers that crash, taxi drivers that drive drunk, train conductors that derail trains; all these people would lose their jobs and probably be in jail. How come a police officer that kills people is exempt? Police get exonerated because...

As an educator, I find this kind of situation puzzling, because it is difficult to teach a positive message from this tragedy. I sit here contemplating the latest police killings of civilian; keep in mind this is just the killings that have been reported, not the extra ones that get swept under the rug. According to “The Counted” ( http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database ), they are up to 566 killed by police this year of 2016. It will be more by the time I finish writing this. I sound cynical don’t I? It is hard not to me with what is going on with this country’s law enforcement. I took out any reference to race and the names of the victims out. Now I want you to imagine if this was your loved one: “A second video showing the shooting death of, a man shot several times while being held on the ground by police outside a Louisiana convenience store was posted online”. “As the man’ s head slumps back...