It is May of 2020. You browse through your news page to be faced with a plethora of images depicting Black activists being tear-gassed, shot by rubber bullets, beaten by batons, and overall violence being projected onto people who are fighting for their lives. This is none other than the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), where countless police officers and security in tactical gear sprayed the crowd with tear gas in over 100 cities, from Albany, New York to Beverly Hills, California. The police officers were called upon to constrain these “rioters’’ who were fighting to dismantle a prevailing injustice: systemic racism. In these protests all over the United States, following the tragic murder of George Floyd, over 14,000 protesters were arrested throughout the entire BLM protests of multiple locations. And sadly, we lost over 19 individuals throughout the entirety of the BLM protests for humanity that happened sporadically throughout the U.S. during May and the summer of 2020.

The police officers, including the very ones who murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, treated Black men and women as criminals. Throughout the 49 cities in America that participated in the BLM protests, there were unnecessarily large numbers of police officers and security to stop the protesting. 

Being in such a polarized nation, the political right responded to the protests of BLM by gaslighting them as “rioters” over Twitter. 

Writer Siobhan Neela-Stock shared that “a prime example is the ‘All Lives Matter’ slogan, which was created in response to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.” 

This form of racial gaslighting during the BLM protests perverts Black Lives Matter’s message by implying that Black people only care about themselves. In reality, Black Lives Matter is trying to shine a light on the constant dehumanization of Black people.

Now going back to recent times, on Jan. 7, your local news stations CNN, BBC News, Fox News, and ABC News are inundated by countless articles all headlining the raid on Capitol Hill, an attempted Make America Great Again (MAGA) coup d’état against the 117th United States Congress. A mostly white mob of extremists, loyal to President Trump, was able to smash their way into the U.S. Capitol, at times shoving police officers to the ground, harassing congressional officers for several hours, and posting photos with stolen items. The police took a decidedly more hands-off approach.

On Jan. 6, Americans began to dissect the muted police response to such an attack on the seat of the government. The lack of violence emerged as a central focus in the long-standing national discourse about race and policing. As images showed the band of police officers dealing with the MAGA mob quite calmly, individuals on social media kept asking “What if it were Black people on Capitol Hill?” Social media, newspapers, and radio stations erupted to scrutinize the double standard after noticing the differences in how police behaved towards the attempted MAGA coup versus the BLM protests. Images depicted the police escorting MAGA terrorists out of Capitol Hill, heavily contrasting photos of seriously injured Black Americans protesting for their lives. 

Ultimately, the mayhem at the Capitol was responsible for the deaths of at least five people—a woman who was shot by the Capitol Police, as well as a Capitol Police officer and three others who died as a result of what authorities called medical emergencies—and led to more than 50 arrests by late Thursday, Jan. 7. Dozens of officers were injured during the attack, said Steven Sund, chief of the Capitol Police.

Visiting professor at Howard University and professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Delores Jones-Brown, described that the violence in the nation’s capital “demonstrated that law enforcement can exercise restraint.”

She continued to say it “marks how racist a society we are and how law enforcement is more readily willing to facilitate behavior of white protesters.”

“There was a clear acquiescence to these rioters’ unlawful behavior. The lack of preparations says something about how law enforcement thought these individuals should be treated as opposed to those who participated in Black Lives Matter,” Jones-Brown said.

President-elect Joe Biden publicly recognized this double standard of policing in a video statement on Thursday, Jan. 7. 

“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they would have been treated very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said. “We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.”

The double standard of police officers is truly sickening. Essentially, police officers are abiding criminals while oppressing minorities, the voices that truly need to be heard. Racism lies in the fault of America, to the point where police officers favor punishing Black individuals fighting for their lives over the white supremacists threatening our democracy. 

Photo has been removed due to copyright infringement.