Police Have Already Shot 561 People in 2016

Hola mi gente,
Welcome to the USA…

comin’ straight from the underground / got it bad ‘cause I’m brown / and not the other color so the police think / they’ve got the authority to kill a minority.
NWA, Fuck the Police

In the USA, you can start your day by watching video of a black man in Louisiana killed by police as he lay helplessly on the ground. You could end it by watching another black man, shot by police in Minnesota, slowly bleed to death in a car as a seven-year-old girl looked on from the back seat and the man's girlfriend prayed to God. A subdued and prone 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot by an officer twice in the chest; then, after a pause, another officer shot him several more times. His hands were empty. You can watch him die on YouTube.

The evening brought the live Facebook stream of 32-year-old Philando Castile bleeding out in a car, his girlfriend interrupting her appeals to God to challenge the actions of the officer she claimed put four bullets in Castile. She claimed they were pulled over for a broken headlight. If this sounds familiar it’s because it is.

We are barely into July and the police have shot 561 people. That’s three people per day, one person every eight hours, with the most recent data showing young black men nine times more likely to be killed than any other group. In addition, blacks as a whole are twice as likely to be killed while unarmed than whites.

Committing horrifying acts in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and even unspeakable deeds become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” Today, it is a systemic way of dehumanizing blacks and other people of color. It is a lawless society or a society whose laws are unjust. A society whose institutions do not follow the rule of law, cannot lay claim to its authority. If you want to see the monster who created this, look no further than the mirror. We have created this.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...