In every profession, there are a few bad apples. I teach; many in my profession care about teaching students. Some don’t. People in a given profession can also change. I am a more passionate teacher than I was a decade ago. We should not be surprised that not all police officers are angels but neither should we expect anything less.

Furthermore, only the naive can ponder an America that has transcended racism. I was so naive. Living in academia, a politically correct bubble, I really thought racism had been mostly expunged from America. Then, last December (2015), I went on Twitter and did a search for “Trump alt right…” Wow — that was a quite a wake-up call. Racism is alive and well in the United States and we need to contend with that.

But, the recent narrative surrounding white police officers shooting unarmed black men has troubled me some. Although some incidents such as the Eric Garner case in New York City are clear examples of where the police went too far, some of the incidents leave many unresolved questions.

In two cities, the responses to a police shooting of an African-American man have been strongest:  Baltimore in the spring of 2015 and Charlotte, this past summer. Something so obvious seems virtually ignored by the entire media and our politicians. In both of these instances, it was not a simple case of a white cop shooting a black man. In Baltimore, three of the six cops transporting Freddie Gray were African-Americans; the police officer in question in Charlotte was African-American.

Why were the reactions most combustible when the police officers were African-American? That really does not make sense. Is this a movement about race, or is it simply an anti-police movement? I remained puzzled about the protests, particularly in Charlotte, where there was not even a white police officer involved in the case. And if this is about the police and not about race, please let’s say that.

Large sections of the African-American community have serious problems; muddying the water in police shootings of African-American men will not help resolve those problems and may even delay possible solutions. Judging individual police officers based on the particular evidence of their performance seems like a great place to start.