As a black ex-police officer, I have been left sorrowful and conflicted after the events in America this week

As a black man and former police officer, I’ve often struggled with my two conflicting identities. Ever since I was a boy, all I wanted to be was a cop. The only colour I wanted to be was blue. However, the dream of serving and the reality of policing are very much two different things.

Today when I heard that five police officers had been killed in Dallas, Texas and another seven injured after a Black Lives Matter demonstration, my heart sank. I didn’t know how to express myself publicly because of my blackness, and I know that many of my friends struggled with this too.

Towards my final years of policing and since leaving, I have advocated for change within the British police to help eradicate institutional racism. Every other day I hear of police brutality in America, and I’ve lost count of how many lives have been taken due to police violence. I’d only just watched the fatal shooting videos of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota by police when I heard of what happened in Dallas.

In the UK police are not routinely armed, but the Black Lives Matter movement is nevertheless sorely needed. Since 1990, 1500 people have died in police custody in England and Wales; too many of these have been non-white. So when I heard about the deaths and injuries of officers in the US, I felt conflicted about publicly expressing my sorrow, sorrowful though I felt inside.

The tragic deaths of the five officers in the US must not stop the progress that is being made to recognise that all lives matter, including black ones. If it leads to a backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, this will be a terrible result for society at large and the American police force as an organisation.

I served in Britain’s two biggest police forces and will tell you now that there is systemic racism within policing. It’s not just black police officers like me who think so, either; Tory leadership candidate Theresa May recently commented that the criminal justice system fails too many ethnic minorities. She is right. President Barack Obama is right, too, when he says that the system of racial profiling in the United States needs to end.

In Britain and America, I cannot see peace or racial harmony in my time if the majority population in both countries, which is white, does not develop the will to understand daily realities for black people – realities like being stopped and searched repeatedly, seeing loved ones die in custody or having their race chronically underrepresented in the emergency services.

This week I suspect there will be silence from the Black Lives Matter movement out of respect for those officers lost and injured, which is right. But after this respectful silence, the baton must be picked back up again and carried forward for progress.

My thoughts now are with the families, friends and colleagues of the police officers killed. I pray that those officers will not have died in vain, and that we will see a less divided and more united society in the future. May God bless them.