As a child, I thought of police officers with veneration — if I saw a cop in the park or one of their patrol cars in the street, I felt safer. I even kept the Portland Police stickers I received at annual parades in a neat pile on the table by my bed.

I told myself that when I got older, I would be wearing the badge too.

At 12 years old, I learned about police brutality. When I first saw the video of Eric Garner being suffocated and thrown to the ground by two New York City police officers, I thought it was a movie. Despite knowing that the officers were at fault, I refused to change my internal rhetoric; I convinced myself that the media was only portraying the bad side of the people I saw as heroes.

Then on July 31, 2017, a police officer shot and killed my cousin, Isaiah Tucker, as he was driving away from a domestic dispute in his home. My family and I crowded around our home computer to watch my cousin, Mikaal, talk on live television about losing his older brother. I no longer dreamt of becoming a police officer.

But the issue is much larger than what happened to Isaiah. According to Mapping Police Violence, an organization that analyzes police brutality data from the U.S. government, 1,147 people were killed by police in 2017. While only making up 13 percent of the population in the United States, African Americans accounted for 25 percent of the victims.

Despite this blatant disproportionality, there is still overwhelming ignorance about it. Just last August, a group of people marched in Philadelphia, countering Black Lives Matter protests with signs and chants of “Blue Lives Matter.” Even in the Grant community, people are quick to challenge discussions of police violence with the idea that “not all cops are bad cops.”

But when we argue in defense of the morality of individual police officers, we are undermining a protest of the larger issue: the unjust system of policing in the United States.

When I met Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “Fatal Force” from the Washington Post, he was adamant that the social narrative regarding police brutality in the United States needs to change. “Conversations about police reform and accountability are about systems and structures, not about individuals,” said Lowery. “If a system isn’t working, it doesn’t matter how good the individuals working within that system may be.”

The problem is that police officers in the United States work in a system with little accountability. In 1994, section 210402 of the Crime Control Act required all police bureaus across the United States to report cases of excessive use of force. But after lobbying by police union representatives, sharing this data became optional.

According to Courier News, 99 percent of reports of police brutality go uninvestigated vis-á-vis this lack of mandatory reporting.

In addition to this privilege, there is a recurring problem with people highlighting the good deeds of a few police officers. Those who safely de-escalate a situation with a person of color or arrest an armed robber without casualties are used to justify the “not all cops are bad cops” perspective.

But these are simply the expectations for their jobs. Police officers who do the right thing are held as heroes simply because we expect them to be villains. It is not that some police officers aren’t doing admirable things in our communities, but revering police officers for not abusing their power is dangerous — it normalizes police violence and numbs society to these issues.

Additionally, many cops — good and bad — pay significant union dues to the arbitrators and union representatives whose job it is to defend police officers in cases of police brutality and murder. The cop who hands out stickers to kids is the same person that paid the lawyer who defended Officer Blane Salamoni after he shot and killed Alton Sterling in Louisiana.

With such strong defense from union representatives in cases of excessive use of force, only 36 percent of officers convicted of these crimes serve prison sentences, according to the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project. “Structurally, our laws and our system of enforcing them grants broad leeway to on-duty police officers and thus, in most use of force cases, the officer involved did not actually commit a crime — no matter what it is they did,” says Lowery.

Until police officers start speaking out against injustice within the system of policing in America and protesting the violence themselves, the idea that “not all cops are bad cops” will continue to belittle attempts to uproot the system. When we go out of our way to controvert this fight, we are perpetuating the inherent problems with racialized policing.

So before you attempt to argue with someone when they express their concern over policing in America, think of Eric Garner. Think of Alton Sterling, Isaiah and the families that were left behind.

We have a responsibility as citizens of this country to call out corruption in systems of power. Policing in America is rooted in racism, oppression and privilege —  it’s time that we recognize that.

I learned to change my perspective. So can you.