She leaned in closer at my answer, her eyes trained on my face, as if not wanting to miss a single word of whatever was about to come out of my mouth.

“In the past couple of months a concerning trend of incidents have been occurring in our county. Young men of color, especially black men, have been the subject of an unusually high number of traffic stops. Most of those have gone on without incident, but a couple of weeks ago a young man who was stopped with two other friends was hospitalized.”

I shook my head, still so shaken by the facts around that incident. “Even though that young man was in the middle of a severe asthma attack triggered by the stress of being stopped, he was too scared to reach into his pocket and get his inhaler.” She nodded at my words in encouragement, and I obliged, feeling like it was finally time to be honest.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to be so scared you’d rather risk losing consciousness than make a sudden movement and chance getting shot. And what that tells me is that no matter what we may think about the intentions of our law enforcement, we need to face the fact that we are not immune to what has been going on around our country. If we can’t take a moment to be honest with ourselves and the biases that exist within our institutions, then we are failing the public we are supposed to be serving.”

I shifted again in my seat, and tried to focus on something on the far side of the wall so I could say what I needed to say. “When I say ‘we’ I want to be clear, I very much mean me. I should’ve been more vocal when the stops began to happen more frequently. I should’ve challenged myself and my colleagues to find a way to publicly talk about why they were happening. To deal with the reality that these stops don’t feel routine to black and brown young men, they feel like life-or-death situations. That for certain communities in our county, contact with the criminal justice system feels dangerous and at times like the opposite of justice. We have to be courageous enough to say we’ve failed in this.”

“That’s a pretty self-recriminating statement. Can you tell me more about that?”

I needed to say this, I could not move forward unless I did.

“It’s the truth and I’m disappointed in myself for not opening my eyes to this until it happened to someone I care about.”