The fatal shooting of the suspect Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, became international news and the perception of American law enforcement changed for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The view that many emerged with was one of an irredeemably racist system policed by bigots and adjudicated by a system corrupted by “systemic” racism. In actuality, the officer’s actions that day were investigated by the county and President Obama’s Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder and were found to be within the law. The officer who shot Michael Brown was answering a robbery call, he did not stop Michael Brown on the street because of his race, nor is there a shred of evidence of racial animus.

The reality is, while no profession can claim to be without flaw, modern American law enforcement agencies as a whole are trained, managed, audited, inspected and scrutinized by some of the most capable professionals amongst us. Additionally, our media are obsessed with any incident that, at face value, may indicate nefarious, biased behavior on the part of an individual officer or group of officers.

There are roughly seven hundred thousand full-time police officers serving in the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2018, there were an estimated fifty to sixty million contacts between police officers and the general public. Of these, police killed 990 people. This is about one death in every fifty-four thousand contacts, or around 0.0000182 percent of encounters. Additionally, these numbers do not reflect the times when deadly force may be justified, but the officer fails to utilize such force.

We have become a society where taking time to objectively explore facts, evidence and circumstances has not only become too laborious and time consuming, it has actually become unacceptable to many. Whatever the seventeen second video clip on your favorite social media platform tells you becomes reality. This disconnected, purely emotional and superficial approach to assessing some of the most socially impactful incidents, is not only a disservice to the law enforcement profession, but ultimately to the communities they serve.

No honest, informed person would proclaim the infallibility of law enforcement agencies, or that of the individual officer. Nor would any honest, informed person proclaim that law enforcement is the problem regarding rampant crime across our nation. It is not. It is the only force standing between civility and anarchy.