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Black Lives Matter: Enough with the Accusations

It doesn’t matter what you are doing, you could be sat enjoying a burger, playing with your child or just talking on the phone; people notice your colour and think they’ve got you all figured out. Your complexion colour has already formed a label in their mind about you, without you having the chance to utter a word. In all races, religions and ethnicity, there are good and bad people in the world however sometimes the actions of one, prevents you from being able to freely relax because a judgement has already clouded a person’s mind about you. You get accused of just glancing at someone, you get women walking on the other side of the road to get away from you, and you get police officers jumping the gun and pinning you down just because of your colour.


Vox.com, a news website shares an article that discusses the likelihood of wrongful convictions based on race. The study which was carried out by National Registry of Exonerations released a document on March 7th 2017 titled ‘Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States’. Between white and black people, innocent black people are more likely to be convicted of crimes wrongfully than innocent white people. For murder, black people are 7 times more like to be wrongfully convicted, 3.5 times more like to be convicted for sexual assault and 12 times more like to be convicted for drug crimes.



The colour of your skin is something that you cannot hide from, you are not the problem, the judgement from close-minded people will prevent them from seeing that there are great people out there, striving to do good.


In the UK, the Government Home Office released statistics on the ‘Stop and Searches’ carried out in England and Wales during 20172018. The information was released on 15th February 2019 and last updated on 8th March 2019. There was 277,378 ‘stop and search’ incidents carried out in that financial year, which is a rate of 5 per 1,000 people. Based on colour, for every 1,000 black people seen, there was 29 stop and searches carried out. Whereas, only 3 stop and searches for every 1,000 white people was carried out in comparison. That’s approximately 9.6 times more likely that a black person would be stopped by police for a ‘random’ search, interestingly it has increased by 5 times as like since 2014/2015 when it was just over 4 times as likely.



It’s clear to see that the justice system is far from right and fair. There isn’t a balance on equally looking at each race and ethnicity. The term ‘you fit the profile’ no longer works as those who look at a certain way cannot be guaranteed to fit the crime committed. It’s time to stop assuming you know who did something and start looking deeper than just their skin colour.

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