Street To Be Renamed To Honor Sandra Bland

(Newswire.net — September 1, 2015) Las Vegas, NV — The street that Sandra Bland was arrested on has just been renamed from University Drive to Sandra Bland Parkway. The city council members of Prairie View, Texas hope that renaming the road will serve as a reminder to law enforcement to always follow best practices when making stops on the streets. The name will remain for three to five years before the council votes on the matter again.

According to NPR, dozens of people have marched over a mile to Prairie View City Hall in order to see the council vote to rename the street in Bland’s honor. The street is a busy roadway that leads to Prairie View A&M, a historically black university and Bland’s alma mater. She was about to begin a job at the university when she was arrested at a traffic stop on July 10. While officials say Bland hanged herself in her cell at the county jail three days later, it was one of the latest strings of deaths of African-Americans while interacting with law enforcement. Due to this controversy, many are calling for changes to be made within the law enforcement itself.

Randy Sutton the founder of Angel Shields, a group dedicated to bridging the gap between the police and the community, has a different opinion of what needs to happen. “Angel Shields is dedicated to bridging the gap of misunderstanding that exists between Law Enforcement and the people they serve and protect. We do that by creating opportunities for individual officers to reach out to adults and children in the communities that they serve in a non-threatening, positive environment. By interacting socially, educationally and charitably the officer and the citizen whether man, woman or child will come to see the ‘human side’ of their police, the person underneath that uniform,”explains Sutton.

He has a firm stance that not all that is portrayed in the media of how the police force act is how they actually are. His group http://angelshields.com is dedicated to showing how the police force is not at all how the media portrays them to be. “Years ago, we trusted the media to report the truth. From political scandals to breaking news, we trusted our journalists to be independent and unbiased. With the explosion of social media, more people get their news online as opposed to the major broadcasters. With the rise of independent journalism comes opinion and advocacy…on all sides. Regardless of your beliefs, there are forces at work to edit, warp, redirect and manipulate what we see, hear and believe. It is becoming extremely difficult to get unbiased news nowadays,”says Sutton.

Sutton believes that like in all professions, there are some bad apples in a bunch of good apples in the police force. While the media likes to portray and expand upon the bad apples, in reality, the bad apples only make up about 1% of the bunch, while the good apples make up the other 99%. So, what does a real police officer look like? Are they as bad as they are made out to be?

“Your local law enforcement are people…people like you. In most cases, they are your neighbors. Angel Shields mission is bring cops and community together-as a team,”says Sutton.

 

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