The Car Maintenance Guide For First Time Car Owners was a guide designed to help new car owners. Not only was it made for first time car owners but it could be used by people who may have had more than one car and yet still don’t understand much about what certain parts of their cars do or are telling them.

In the beginning of my capstone I had originally planned to do an EMT course and demonstrate my skills and understanding from the course to help educate others at our school. In the end I didn’t get much support therefore I had to change my capstone to another passion I had. This passions prime focus was on cars.

I have always loved cars since I was a young kid, but what I loved more was taking things apart and putting them back together. I was a Lego kid, and one summer I got the chance to work on someone’s car and try and figure out what part of the car did what and how did it work? with all these questions I wanted to know more.

For my capstone I decided I would try and understand as much about certain car parts not just for myself but to also inform others so they can fix there car without having to pay someone a lot of money for a maintenance that they could do on their own. This became my capstone, which was to make a guide to help inform those who don’t know much about their own car.

In my last slate post I wrote a piece called “Born Different” in which I talked about me being different from everyone else in my family and what that felt like for me. I also talked about my brother and how he helped me understand that I belonged even though I was different from everyone else in my family. He helped me see that being different wasn’t so bad and that being brown in a white family wasn’t bad either. In my ongoing research something that I have done was make a blog post. In the beginning I was going to do an instagram but then I decided to do a blog post. I did this because I didn’t have too much time but If I can I would do an instagram post to have my research be more out there in the world. It would also show people what the police force has become well before even now but even more so now that they have become a militarized type of police force. For this to change I believe that either defunding or just not putting as much money into the police force would help them not be so militarized. Yes I get that they have to protect people but they shouldn’t be so over militarized to the point where they have pretty much huge armored vehicles, grenade launcher type things like the thing they shoot tear gas out of. Overall I just think they need to not get as much funding so they don’t become over militarized. I also think that the police put people of color in prison even when they do nothing wrong so that’s why I think that the justice system also needs to be fixed. Lastly I think that the amount of time for police that are trained should be increased and police should be monitored by a single overlooking type of government. Especially now with everything that’s been going on and that’s getting released right now out in the world.

When pursuing my agent of change I was thinking about what I could really reflect on and the most recent thing at the time was my brother’s arrest and what he had noticed with the police. In the end I decided to choose the topic of militarized police and well police in general. I did this because when my brother was arrested the police didn’t let him get a phone call. They took him to a prison facility where he was later integrated by the FBI and asked certain questions all because he was trying to help people who were being tear gassed at a protest. He was trying to help people by providing water with certain stuff inside to help with the eyes but when he was arrested he was accused of mixing chemicals to create something worse. When he was taken they also took his friend and put zip ties on their wrists but to the point where my brother’s friends hands turned purple. They asked to loosen them but they didn’t know how to. Later they were put into the system and transferred to several different prisons for hours until he and my brother were split up and put into different jail cells. My brother was telling me how he got put into a cell with a black man who had his back broken and how the police didn’t even bother helping him so the man was cold throughout the night since it was cold that night. In the end I was reflecting on everything me and my brother talked about. I decided to do the topic of militarized police which also went deeper into the funding of police. Funding into prison training and the actual police force. I was effective at making a change by telling my brother’s story to my friends helping them see how the police treat prisoners. Citizens. Black people.

Doing this project I felt pretty good about what I decided to do for my Y&TW project. I also felt pretty strongly for what I was looking for when I was researching. But overall I felt pretty good about my project and felt like I did a lot. Something that I learned about myself is that after doing this project I see more now that the police in the US are pretty much a second type of military. In a way, the way it’s going or was going showed that the police was becoming more of a military type of force than a police force. Something I learned from my brother was that after he was arrested he learned something from the guy in his cell who told him “don’t worry you’ll be okay youll have have a lot better chance getting out of here than I will”. After that he was starting to calm down and got out the next day but he reflected on that moment because he was white and the guy in the cell was black with a broken back and my brother wasn’t in any pain but was just afraid because of his interrogation with the FBI. Something that I feel like I could have done better with is going into more detail about my Y & TW project or maybe by doing an instagram post instead of a Blog Post would have been better. I think something that people need to do is know more about the police being militarized and spreading it but a lot of people don’t think of that when they hear about police when really the police are militarized in the US. So I think writing more or spreading more about the police being militarized could help people understand more about it.

I started to write this piece sometime around the end of October. I worked on it in my home because I don’t go to in-person school anymore. I wrote it on a laptop often with my dog’s snout getting in the way.

My writing relates to being a teenager during this year because nowadays most teens that I know have strong opinions about my topic which is racial injustice and police brutality. I thought sharing my experience would show people that teenagers are aware of police brutality and the broken justice system. We teenagers are angry with how police are handling things. We want to see things change.

I don’t want to live in a world where as a person of color I have to keep my hood down, my hands out of my pockets and my eyes on the ground. That is why I wrote this piece.