I don’t trust the police.

I am a Black woman in America who has seen the police do dangerous and corrupt things over the years, and it has left me believing that the threat they pose to the safety of the general public far outweighs the supposed benefits that come with having an active police force. 

I recently heard another story that affirmed this for me. I will preface this by saying that the story I’m going to tell is wild, son, and there are parts of it that are going to make you laugh, but even as you laugh at what could be called the stupidity and illogical fear of a Florida law enforcement officer, please keep in mind that his actions unnecessarily endangered the life of an unarmed Black man and that sobering fact that is the most important detail in this story. 

The tragicomedy of the Florida sheriff’s deputy who got into a shootout with an acorn

I wanted to write about this because my initial reaction upon reading the headline was “what the entire fuck?”

We always hear about police officers discharging their weapons because they supposedly feared for their life, but how do you justify an officer being frightened by the sound of a falling acorn?

As you can read in my column, the officer was found to have used excessive force (he fully emptied his gun into a police vehicle), but he was not found to be criminally negligent.

I don’t understand how someone so jumpy could be found to not have been criminally negligent in firing his side-arm.

An acorn? An acorn? An acorn?

Regular citizens are expected to remain calm in the presence of armed police officers, even when said police officers are being aggressive, but a police can be frightened by the sound of dropping tree fruit, and that’s OK?

It makes absolutely no sense to me.