We’ve run out of time to argue.

I was born and raised in Wilson and I know how easy it is to become exhausted with the news. The world you see on TV — ripe with unrest and disorder — doesn’t match the reality you see out your window. Many of you, understandably, probably just shut off the TV.

It might seem simple to some. Some people watching TV might think the protesters are just immature or entitled — or worse — criminals. After all, if you’re protesting against police, you must be a criminal.

It’s very easy to distill the issue down this way. Especially if you know people in law enforcement, as I do. Many members of my family are cops. I worked for the Ellsworth County Sheriff ’s Office and the Kansas State University Police Department for a combined eight years, and developed friendships with many cops.

Working as a 911 dispatcher in both departments, I always viewed my work as noble and important, and it was. But I learned lessons in my time there that helped me to later understand the dire need for justice reform in the United States.

But before we get to that, we should talk a little about the beginnings of policing in the United States. This is something that deserves a chapter in a book, at the very least, rather than a paragraph, so I can’t encourage you enough to do your own research. But to summarize, much of what we know of policing in the U.S. today evolved out of slave patrols in the late 18th and early 19th century. These patrols were private endeavors designed to monitor and control the movements of slaves in pre-Civil War America.

Between the 1830s and 1890s, population explosions in many metropolitan areas led to the founding of the first publicly funded police forces in the country. These forces were primarily focused on control of those considered to be of a “lower” or “dangerous” class. The idea was that groups like freed slaves, immigrants and the poor might pose a threat to the higher classes or cause social disorder and therefore must be controlled. These “control” tactics were based almost entirely on punishment. The system was designed to hold these classes down and keep them down. There was little to no focus placed on helping these “lower” classes increase their standing.

This idea has permeated policing throughout its history. The “Jim Crow” laws of the post-Civil War south are the most prominent example. More modern examples include the War on Drugs in the 1970s and 80s, “proactive policing” and “zero-tolerance” policing of the 1990s and into today. Each of these tactics helped propel mass incarceration in the U.S. and targeted the same classes of people who might’ve been considered “lower” or “dangerous” in previous centuries of American society.

In my time in law enforcement in Ellsworth County, I saw the effects of these practices. The same faces populated the jail over and over, often because of the same focus on punishment with almost no resources for the punished to get better. In fact, incarceration more often had the opposite effect.

As I’ve moved on from Kansas, living a year in Atlanta, Ga. and in Milwaukee, Wis. the last two years, I’ve seen more up close the difference of these tactics in urban settings. From a distance, it’s easy to see the protests on TV and count them as an overreaction to tragic isolated incidents committed by a few “bad apples” in policing. But it’s not just a few bad apples, and it’s not just a few isolated incidents. The dramatic instances of police brutality are only the spark, lighting a fuel of discontent that’s been building for decades, if not centuries.

Throughout its history, policing had been designed to hold down the so-called “dangerous” classes, and these practices dis proportionately target black Americans most.

When combined with congruent discrimination in education, employment, housing, healthcare, and virtually every other structural aspect of society, it becomes clearer that not only is there a real problem here, but it’s systemic.

It’s not about just a few bad police officers. It’s not even about individual police officers at all. It’s about the entire system. In recent weeks, arguments to reform or “fix” policing have been raised, but the issue is that policing isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed.

I could go into a lot more here. I could expand on how struggles with employment, education, housing and healthcare perpetuate segregation and trap many black Americans in desperate situations. I could touch on the fraternal nature of policing that can discourage and often punish good cops from calling out fellow officers’ misconduct. I could highlight the wide range of unfair responsibilities police are expected to uphold in communities, from responses to domestic terror threats, cases of severe mental illness for which they have little to no training to handle, all the way down to responding to calls of barking dogs.

But instead I’ll close with a plea for empathy. I know how easy it is to feel disconnected from the world we see on the news. I know how difficult it can be to try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s experience is so remarkably different from your own. But I would hope the points I’ve outlined here might make what’s going on in our country a little clearer. And I hope the need for change is clearer too.

Because we’ve run out of time to argue.

Derek Moeller-Smith is the son of Darrin and Cathy Smith of Wilson. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisc. He credits include first page project manager at WeHaa, a white label internet marketing company, a contributor at SB Nation and former editor and sports editor of the Daily Union.