We & police brutality
Why we have to fight
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are only a few of the Americans killed by police officers these past years. Their names have been raised up at protests across the country asking for reforming or defunding the police.
Police brutality varies in type, from assault to battery, mayhem, torture, and even murder. Americans of different races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of Black people among victims of police brutality is anti-Black racism among members of mostly white police departments.
Similar prejudices played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups. Statistics show that people of color face a higher possibility of being shot by police than do white men and women. That risk peaks in young adulthood and men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed by police.
Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States looks to only be rising, with a total of 132 civilians having been shot, 16 of whom were Black, in the first two months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,004 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, reaching 35 fatal shootings per million of the population as of February 2021.
To conclude, as Martin Luther King once said: “Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about the things that matter.” So let’s fight to achieve our rights.
