Christian Farmer

3/26/2020

English 2010

New Perception of Police

When I first moved to Utah from Virginia it was quite an adjustment but I had always held police
in a high regard for I believed they truly benefited society and that they put their lives on the line to
protect others, and that is something I always thought very highly of; you see my family has been
military for generations as well as first responders, so selflessness and service to your country and to the
people of it, and having respect for those that do it, was a concept that was deeply ingrained in me for
as long as I can remember. When I moved I first arrived in Utah county and began making friends at my
elementary school, it was something that seemed to be a very common value many of the other
students had as well, one classmate of mine in particular however didn’t share that same perspective.
He wasn’t really one of my friends, more of an acquaintance who I thought was extremely disrespectful
and ungrateful, you see our school cop was a very inquisitive type of person so he would often start up a
conversation with the students to strike a bond so they would feel comfortable talking to him. But
whenever the officer approached Donnie and attempted to converse, Donnie would all but ignore him, if
he did not ignore him, he would always have an aggressive tone of voice towards the officer. As a 10-
year-old child who had a very limited number of run ins with the police I could simply not understand
why he would treat the officer that way and I had a bit of a grudge against him because of it. It was not
until roughly a year and a half after I met Donnie that during a class presentation, I began to become
more aware of his situation and the anger he had towards cops. Mr. Gann (our fifth-grade teacher) had
asked us to give a short summary of ourselves and what our most emotional memory was. When it was
his turn to speak, he stood up from his seat and at this point I was already a little annoyed because I did
not harbor many good feelings towards him. He started it off by introducing himself,

“Hi class, my name is Donnie and I moved to Utah a little over a year ago, it definitely was an
emotional time for me but not the most emotional I’ve ever been”.

As he spoke, I could hear his voice begin wavering, which pulled me in and got me terribly
interested in what he had to say because I had rarely ever seen him display genuine emotion or sadness.
He continued his presentation,

“I was born in south LA and lived there until the summer before my 4 th grade which is when I
moved here. My mom is a baker and my dad does construction and we had a n-nice life out there.”

At this point in his story I could already see tears starting to form in his eyes, trying to maintain
his tough image he pretended to cough and wiped his eyes in the process, trying to be discreet, sadly,
being 5th graders it wasn’t very smooth and most of the class noticed how painful talking about his past
was for him. At one point our teacher even offered to let him sit down and not make him finish the rest,
but being a young man and trying to be tough and prideful he didn’t want to look weak or sad, so he
continued;
 “sadly we had to leave our entire life behind because on my way home from school I was
constantly detained by cops, I was never in any gang or doing anything illegal, I simply had to walk
through a bit of a more sketchy neighborhood to get back to mine. I didn’t even live in that
neighborhood…”.

His voice began to die down towards the end of that sentence as a tear rolled down his face,
this time he didn’t try to hide it, he was in too much of an emotionally intense state to worry about how
the class viewed him. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or hearing, I have had cops give me donuts, or
high fives and always were so nice, never had I dreamed that they would harass a kid just because he
walked through a neighborhood on his way home from school. After that he sat back down not having
the mental strength to continue. Afterschool that day I did not know what to think, I was so confused
and that is when my drive to learn about the law and make a genuine difference in society started. But
even then, I was so sheltered to the full travesty that happens all around the world with police
overreacting with violence or jumping to conclusions and rushing to arrests.