Police Brutality In Nic Stone's Dear Martin

America’s justice system is not an equitable one, as portrayed in Nic Stone’s Dear Martin, using unfair treatment and stereotyping of black teens, police brutality, and difficulty convicting police officers. Dear Martin, is a story about Justyce McAllister's life and his experiences with discrimination for being black. In the first couple of pages, he gets brutalized by police officers without being able to say anything. He goes through life going through these events of police brutality and discrimination, with his best friend even being killed by a police officer. These series of events all lead to him learning to accept himself and to work hard to become the change he wants in the world. At the very beginning of the book, our protagonist,

With blood in his mouth and before he could get a word out, the police officer says: ““Don’t you say shit to me, you son of a bitch. I knew your punk ass was up to no good when I saw you walking down the road with that goddamn hood on”” (Stone, 12). Considering the police officer saw Justyce up the road with his hoodie on and later came around to brutalize him, it is accurate to infer that the police officer followed Justyce or stayed in the area to watch him. The police officer’s image of Justyce is that of a black teen who is about to commit a crime in his community. Assumptions like these are made all the time against black males, one of these stereotypes being: ““I know your kind: punks like you wander the streets of nice neighborhoods searching for prey. Just couldn’t resist the pretty white girl who’d locked her keys in her car, could ya?”” (12). Grouping black males into one group and putting labels on them such as “violent” or “up to no good”, has consequences like taking away their individuality and making them no more than their skin

This doesn’t help either side gain trust. As black teens continue to play into the same stereotypes that they should be fighting to get out of, causing them to continually label them as “dangerous” and “violent”. With the police force being a part of the justice system, how could the justice system be fair if a part of the justice system discriminates against a major demographic in the U.S.? In Atlanta, Georgia, the typical sentence for felony murder is a life sentence. For the police officer that killed Manny, his sentence was for two misdemeanors. The vastly different prison sentences are a glaring issue for the justice system. In the court case against Officer Tison for the murder of Manny Rivers. The overall media and witness consensus was that they were violent "thugs" that were going to kill Officer Tison. He didn’t fire first, seen in a conversation between newspaper publishers: "Officer Tison says these boys pointed a gun at him, and after seeing this picture, I can't say I'd put it past them"