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He was a Black man with three kids.

His fellow officers in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department called him Bo.

Bo was shot in the head responding to a shooting call in the Tower Grove South neighborhood, where a gunman had barricaded himself in a home. The 43-year-old white suspect, a fugitive from Florida, was arrested Sunday morning after a standoff. Bohannon died later that day. The suspect was charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday.

Jacob Blake is 29 years old.

His three boys were in his vehicle on a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin, earlier this month when he was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer. The shooting was caught on cellphone video. Blake became the next hashtag in the Black Lives Matter movement, a Black man shot in the back by police. He’s alive, but paralyzed.

Both violent incidents are tragedies worthy of mourning and reflection. But a divided America doesn’t mourn such shootings as a collective soul. Not enough of us anyway. Some of us mourn the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the violent shooting of Blake, with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, as we take a stand against police violence against Black people. Others mourn the death of Bohannon with the hashtag #BackTheBlue and lament the danger police officers face every day in increasingly difficult jobs in our violent and divided times.

Redditt Hudson hopes for the day when we mourn together as a nation.

“There is no ‘either side,’� Hudson says. A 55-year-old Black man who grew up in St. Louis, Hudson is a former police officer in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He’s the co-founder of the , and works in the diversion program in Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office. “I’m against violence in the community, period.�

His words echo those of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is the Democratic nominee for president. In Pennsylvania for a speech on Monday, Biden challenged President Donald Trump to decry all kinds of violence in America, including the deaths in Kenosha attributed by police to 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Illinois. Trump failed the challenge, responding with a justification of the sort of vigilante violence carried out by his supporters.

The day after Bohannon died, The New Republic by Hudson that he had been working on for weeks that ended up with a bit of serendipitous, or unfortunate, timing, depending on your perspective. Titled “The Hell of Being a Black Cop,� the piece encourages Black police officers in the U.S. to take a stand against racism, both privately in their departments, and publicly during this growing civil rights movement that defines our times.

“Fairly or not, the onus has always disproportionately fallen on Black people, from the Civil War down to the civil rights movement, to make America more equal. The same could be said of one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time: fixing the police,� Hudson wrote.

Black police officers faced the same challenge in his time as a cop, decades ago, as they do now, he said, living as Black men and women in communities that face poverty and violence because of decades of intentional neglect, while serving in departments under attack for their too often unequal treatment of Black people.

“The two groups intersect,� Hudson says. That’s why he sees Blake’s shooting, and the killing of Bohannon, through a similar lens, and mourns both tragedies.

“I see those men as similarly situated in the roles they played in their family’s lives,� Hudson says. One of those men, Bohannon, will be portrayed as a hero, and rightly so. The other is already going through what Hudson calls “post-traumatic indictment,� that process that happens every time a Black man is shot by a police officer, in which his past sins are brought forward immediately to lesson the intensity or impact of a bad shooting.

Meanwhile, the white Florida man who killed Bohannon was taken into custody after a night of negotiation in which “the value of his life was affirmed,� Hudson notes. As the violence in St. Louis rises again this summer, Hudson thinks back to every other year this has happened in his lifetime in St. Louis, multiple times, with the same sort of “this must stop� mentality thrown at it by elected officials, who rarely address the underlying causes of the two biggest reasons for the violence: racism and guns.

“St. Louis has had hundreds of murders since I was on a tricycle,� Hudson says. “If we ever found the courage or the honesty to address how race has shaped the American landscape, we could make so much more progress in addressing violence.�