Saying what needs to be said

Ken Wallace, a “scrawny, 48-year-old white guy”, was in a scary situation with his daughter and an Arizona state trooper.  It's described here in frightening detail.  On a personal level, this is a terrifying event that needs to be rectified.  But Wallace appropriately took it beyond that, to the cultural level:

"If you are a person who has ever looked skeptically at the claims of Black Lives Matter, or others who talk about police violence, I urge you to consider what happened to me and put yourselves in the shoes of others. I just survived a bizarre gunpoint situation in which I was as innocent as Philando Castile, who was not as lucky as I was. We live in a society where anywhere and everyone can have a gun at any time, and police are responding with fear in dangerous ways. I got lucky tonight. My daughter and I made it to the Grand Canyon and I’m going to try to salvage what’s left of our vacation. Many others — because of the color of their skin or the way they look or because of simple bad luck — did not meet the same fate."

While the officer's actions were reprehensible, this is not his sole responsibility. We're seeing these types of events all over the country.  The problem is systemic. We need to be able to change how the system works.  There's no way a person who's done nothing wrong and his seven year old child should have to go through an event like this and then be told, "This case is a prime example of how things should be done."  No, it's not.  Trauma is not an acceptable result of an every day traffic stop.  Police officers everywhere should be speaking out against these types of events and so should the rest of us.  Start talking.