That's very fair. Unfortunately, being a big black dude is a great way to look threatening, which does suck. As a point of encouragement, though, it is worth noting that in spite of the national news, encounters with police are really rare, and deadly encounters super rare. Many officers go an entire career without ever firing their gun at anyone - it's just very rare. Your staircase is way more likely to kill you.

In fact, I remember having a really interesting conversation with a friend about this stuff a few years ago. We were talking about the statistic that black people are shot by police at twice the rate white people are. And yet some black people are so afraid of police in a traffic stop, they freak out if they haven't adequately prepared for it, and white people are so unafraid that they're shocked it's perceived as anything other than paperwork by the officer and nothing about it seems even potentially dangerous. I said - the difference between those two views isn't 2x. Black people don't think cops are twice as dangerous as white people... more like infinity x. And I said, either cops are way more dangerous than I was raised to believe, or way less dangerous than you were raised to believe, or both.

Well - I think it's both. I think if you are afraid of police in every encounter, a good reality check is to look up the absolute number of people killed by police anually and figure out how dangerous that really makes them compared to, I don't know, lawnmowers or something. And on the flip side, I think if you think police are really safe, a good reality check is to look at some of the training they do, some of the threats they face, understand how very fast a peaceful situation can turn violent and how easy it is to look like a threat, and understand that you have to be thoughtful and deliberate about everything you do around a cop, particularly in the situations that are most dangerous to them.