Changes needed in police policies

Cincinnati police shot and killed an unarmed black man April 7, according to ABC News. Actually, because Timothy Thomas was only 19 years old, I should say an unarmed black teenager. Thomas was running from police because he was wanted for a few misdemeanors and traffic tickets -- a hardened criminal indeed. \nI'm not surprised he ran. I would run from the Cincinnati police, too, if I were a black teenager. The police have killed 15 people since 1995, four since November, and every one of their victims had one thing in common -- they were all black. Fifteen black people killed, zero whites. I don't blame them for rioting.\nI can also understand why the police have started to take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality when dealing with the community they have sworn to protect. It's a simple combination of racism, guns on the street and unpopular laws, and it's not just a Cincinnati problem. It's a nationwide problem. \nThis racism is easy to prove. In 1997 the Justice Department charged the city of Pittsburgh with tolerating a long-standing pattern of abuse by its police, especially in black communities. New Jersey admitted using racial profiling after troopers shot three minority students when their van started to roll after being pulled over for traffic violations. In New York, in response to the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, the U.S. Attorney's office found a pattern of racial bias in police officers' practices. \nPolice officers are trained to see black people as suspects. If the governor, state attorney general and the police chief have driven into these officers' minds that the black teenager they're chasing into a dark alley at 3 a.m. is most likely a hardened criminal, who can blame them for being so scared that they pull the trigger?\nAnother reason for police officers to be scared out of their wits is the number of guns on the street. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as of 1997, U.S. citizens owned about 230 million firearms, 75 to 80 million of which happened to be easily concealed handguns. Craig W. Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, said in an interview with CN.com that a law enforcement officer dies on the job every 54 hours on average. Don't tell me they aren't thinking about that statistic when chasing a suspect into that alley in the drug-infested part of town.\nOf course, all of this pales in comparison to the biggest reason these police shootings are happening -- the Drug War. \nAccording to the Department of Justice, as of June 30, 2000, the United States has a record 1,931,859 people in federal, state and local prisons or jails. That represents 25 percent of the world's prison population. To top it all off, one out of every eight black males from age 20 to 34 is in prison right now. \nThe war on drugs has led to these insane statistics. In 1980, 25 percent of prisoners were drug offenders. In 1998, that number increased to a whopping 59 percent. And minorities now comprise 79 percent of drug offenders in state prisons. \nAs for the general population, 14.8 million Americans are drug users, according to the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. They make up 6.7 percent of the population 12 years old and older. Out of this number, 8.4 million smoked marijuana.\nThe percentages are higher for college students. In 1999, 17.3 percent of all college students smoked marijuana, and 33.8 percent smoked cigarettes. In other words, for every two college students you see smoking a cigarette, another smokes marijuana.\nThese are millions of people who see the police as the enemy. They will do anything to avoid contact with law enforcement, because they know they can easilly become one of the millions in prison. Because of the mandatory sentence guidelines that seem to grow longer every year, these people live in fear of the police. They will run, and some will even kill if given the chance. \nPolice officers know this as well as anyone, and it affects them. Human beings do not like to be hated. Officers also realize that drug users are a desperate people and do desperate things when confronted. This leads to shootings.\nTo stop these police shootings, those in authority need to stop making police officers follow racist policies. We have to rid the streets of the obscene number of guns that endanger the lives of officers. We need to seek alternatives to incarceration as a way to address the drug problem in the United States. Until these changes take place, Thomas will not be the last unarmed teenager to be gunned down by a police officer.