SketchBank a Digital Sketchbook by: Amar Ashworth

This is not a piece I wanted to do. I tried, it didn’t work, and eventually I couldn’t think of anything else. Sometimes creativity forces our hand, sometimes something happens that creates the work for us, and sometimes something so horrific that it scars us for life happens. This isn’t any of those things, this is an ongoing horror. I’m not sure how to fix this either, we need police, but we need police who are accountable, we need police who are non violent, we need police who are human. I’m starting to think we need police with cameras and brains, not police with guts and guns. They say the tools make the man, what does it say about the police, that the only tools they ever seem to use are the tools that cause pain and death? What makes a person shoot another person in the back? What training could cause an armed and armored officer to fear for his life from an unarmed citizen? We need to not only look at these things, but we also need to think about limiting the damage the police can do in our name, I think we have shown that no amount of sensitivity training can prevent this from happening, we need to reconsider policing, at the tools level, and we need to limit the tools available to officers to match the situation, not exceed it. We need to realize that the crimes that often lead to police killings are often harmless and victimless crimes and I struggle to understand how it could be justified to kill someone for a petty crime.

We need to refuse the status quo, we can do better, we must do better.