Egyptia Green is only 13 but she wanted her voice heard when it comes to change, so she organized a march Tuesday on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach.
Green's march may not have stopped traffic on South Florida’s busiest streets but it came with a powerful message.
"I just want to make sure that kids out there like me out there aren’t afraid of their future or what's going to happen to them because of all the bad stuff that’s happening,” Green said.
Green echoed what many have said since George Floyd’s killing: the time for fairness in policing is long overdue. She thinks police announcing more training and accountability are a move in slow motion.
"I’ve seen some things but its still going like really slowly,” Green said. "I’m not impatient. I just don’t feel like it should take this long."
Lori Bakkum was walking along with Green, not hesitating to say that Green’s parents weren’t born yet when she was seeing discrimination.
"Decades and decades of some words but not enough action clearly, and I feel that finally this time it's not going to fade way,” Bakkum said.
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The marchers spoke to Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola about what’s he’s doing.
"I sponsored an item to review our policing practices to make sure that Miami Beach is the gold standard in the nation for our policing practices and later this week we are going to be taking up a couple more items," Arriola said.
City of Miami Fraternal Order of Police President Tommy Reyes said the department is already ahead of the game when it comes to good community relations and efforts to provide resources to experts like social workers, and said shifting some calls to them would help police too.
"Here in Miami I think we are in a pretty good place. We do things a little bit better," Reyes said. "If we had more resources at our hand that we could use to better serve the community I am absolutely OK with that but we have to have those resources and the responsibilities would have to shift so we could get back to police work."
Reyes said that over the years the police have become the 911 for everything. He said when it comes to holding police accountable that should certainly happen, but when it comes to things like taking away protections like those in the state Officer Bill of Rights, he said the officers like any other citizen deserve their due process rights to look at evidence against them and get their day in court.
