[ebilgenius]

Article should be titled "Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent a lot of the police in St. Louis were". This article is relying on the author's personal experiences in the force and fails to bring any hard statistics.

While there is certainly a problem with racism in Police Departments this article fails to find the ultimate source of that racism, and without truly understanding where Police racism is coming from the authors solution of "We need harsher punishments and better oversights" doesn't guarantee it will fix the problem.

Like with the public in general, only a small (but very loud) percentage of the Police are bad people. Bringing harsher punishments down on the Police is not the answer. By their very nature the Police need to do things that put dangerous people in harms way for the safety of others. If they are not allowed to do that without thinking that they're going to get punished for it, they will not be able to do their jobs effectively.

There are definitely cases where bad Police do bad things, and they DO get punished for it, but just like every other person in America they are innocent until proven guilty, and it can take a long time before a case can be put together. By that time the media (and the Public's attention) have been pointed to the next "Police tragedy".

[Retra]

Hard statistics are plentiful. Do a web search.

[ebilgenius]

I'm sure they are, however none are listed in this article.

[michaelbuddy]

Yes, welcome to the Washington Post, where everything remotely containing racism gets front page, factual or not. They'd put up a story about a grandma hearing a slur from outside her window above a story about a jet plane crash any day of the week.