Allow me to formally start off this piece by stating rest in peace to Terence Crutcher and offering my most sincere condolences to his family. I would like also to state that I am completely and utterly disgusted by the actions of officers Tyler Turnbough and Betty Shelby of the Tulsa police department.

Now, if you haven’t seen the video footage released on Monday, September 19, it shows these two Tulsa police officers shooting an unarmed black man to death on the night of Friday, September 16 after he approached his SUV with his arms raised. That unarmed man was Crutcher, a forty-year-old husband and father of four children. You’re likely wondering ‘well what happened? Was there a crime committed? Did he get pulled over? Did he have a weapon?’ I regret to inform you: No, none of those occurrences took place in this conflict.

Officers were responding to a couple of 911 call of a car being stalled on the side of the road—that car was Crutcher’s. His vehicle had been reported abandoned and left running in the middle of the road at 7:36 p.m. Crutcher simply needed help, as a police officer is supposed to do, serve. They are public servants here to serve the needs of the public, so why oh why did officers Shelby and Turnbough approach this situation as if it were a dangerous crime scene. For several seconds on the video footage, you can witness an officer following Crutcher from behind with a gun aimed at him. Then more officers converge on the scene as Crutcher lowers his hands and approaches his SUV and then he suddenly drops to the street. Why? Because at this moment Crutcher was tased and then shot.

If for whatever reason you were not able to ascertain this logic from the description of the incident, this assault and shooting was for absolutely nothing. You’re not gonna tell me we live in a country where a man can plant 3 bombs in the greater New York/New Jersey area, have a shootout with police, and still get taken into custody alive. Yet a man on the side of the road because his car has stalled out, approaching his SUV with his arms raised gets shot and killed. This, ladies and gentlemen, makes absolutely no sense.

It truly disturbs me that Crutcher felt the need to put his arms up because he wasn’t committing a crime. Unfortunately in the current state of our country, when you’re a black man in America, that is the type of precaution you find to be necessary to take when approached by the police. Furthermore, it is deeply saddening to see that such protocol cannot even guarantee you safety from being killed at the hands of these officers.

Tyler Turnbough tased Crutcher and Betty Shelby shot and him, yet later stated that ‘he wasn’t cooperating.’ The fact of the matter is you police officers were the ones not cooperating. Crutcher’s car was stalled on the side of the road and he simply needed help. He needed you to cooperate with him and to serve your community and it’s residents the way your motto claims that you will.

“He looks like a bad dude” Turnbough states in the footage. Why, because he was big and black? From what the footage portrays, I don’t see anything else about this situation that would make officers think he was a “bad dude.” This is the epitome of profiling, the epitome of prejudice; prejudging someone based off all these false narratives of African American characteristics and behavior you have embedded in your mind.

Don’t talk to me about Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem anymore. This is exactly why I would rather have someone stand for people, then stand for a flag. I don’t care about people not standing for the flag, what I care about is our fellow Americans being unjustly killed by the police officers in this country.

I would like to be specific and say black Americans, but when you put the word black in the sentence, some people just don’t listen. Just as when theses people see a black person they don’t see another human being, they don’t see a father, a husband, a brother, an uncle, all they see is a “bad dude.”

I will continue stress the importance of this point: If all you people in positions of power who have voices, who are upset and speaking out about people not standing for the flag, if you were to be as outraged over police killing unarmed Americans as you are over people not standing for the flag, we would have a much better state of affairs in this country.

For the moment being, Betty Shelby has been placed on paid administrative leave, she probably won’t be charged, the family of Terence is going to get a settlement, Terence will still be dead, and the media will be back in a couple of weeks talking about the latest police shooting of an unarmed black man in America that was captured on video. I can almost guarantee this.

If you watched this video of Terence Crutcher getting shot and killed by police for absolutely no reason; having no weapons, no gun in the car, hands up in the air, on the side of the road with his stalled car getting treated like a violent criminal. If you watched this video of an innocent man dying on the ground, but you are more outraged over people not standing for a flag, then you are absolutely part of the problem and you just don’t get it. Nor do you believe in equality or justice for all, the very ideals which that flag is meant to represent.