List of people killed by cops in 2013, 2014, 2015: http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014.html
Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations - Hatred, Cops And The Law
Here's The News Report We'd Be Reading If Walter Scott's Murder Wasn't On Video
American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Year
http://paxonbothhouses.
One Small Town's Cops Have Killed More People Than Combined Police Of Germany And U.K.
http://paxonbothhouses.
The Beginning Of The End For Cop-Killer Privilege: "#CrimingWhileWhite"
Black Kids Get Shot For Their Mistakes. White Kids Get Psychologized
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/black-kids-get-shot-for-their-mistakes.html
"White Teen In BMW Hits Three Cars, Flees Scene, Assaults Cops, And Doesn't Get Shot"
White Man Jaywalks With Assault Rifle. Guess What Police Do
"The Talk." How Black Parents Tell Their Sons To Be Safe
Open Season On Unarmed Black Men. White Cop Kills Another Innocuous Black Man
Judge Throws Out Black Teen's Conviction 70 Years After Execution
"More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists Even Though Crime Is Down"
Whites Think Discrimination Against Them Is A Bigger Problem Bias Against Blacks
Yamiche Alcindor
The video of a South Carolina police officer shooting a black man in the back as he ran away gives victims of police misconduct new ammunition to overturn common assumptions about police brutality, but families of victims and civil rights advocates wonder if it will be enough to spur real change.
Police who shoot and kill suspects often escape prosecution because the criminal justice systems places a high value on an officer's word and often accepts their narrative of events, says attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the family of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was killed by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer last summer. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.
In the most recent incident, North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager, 33, who claimed he shot Walter Scott, 50, in self-defense after Scott grabbed his Taser, is facing a murder charge after a video surfaced that disputed his claim.
"They use this narrative all the time," Crump said. " 'I was in fear of my life. I felt threatened. They reached for my weapon.' That's how they justify killing us. Now that it's been exposed with this case, will America challenge it?"
On Wednesday, at an annual gathering in New York of the National Action Network, a group founded by civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, policy makers and families of victims mulled over whether Scott's death and the dramatic video would shake the conscience of the nation enough to confront issues of biased policing.
In a tweet Wednesday Hillary Clinton described the Scott shooting as "too familiar" and said, "We can do better - rebuild trust, reform justice system, respect all lives."
"We need to get to the point where we are doing more than responding to tragic cases," said Ronald Davis, director of the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
Davis described the video of Scott's shooting as "troubling." Going forward, he said, the nation needs to have conversations that lead to actions and changes to the culture of policing. Officers must acknowledge how departments have oppressed certain communities and the role some police strategies have played in harming some neighborhoods, he said.
Scott's case offers more proof of the fatal impact of racially biased policing and another opportunity to look harder for solutions, said Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden.
"We would love to see change," McSpadden said. "We want to hope that this video shows the truth and that people would see what our eyes see."
Raw video is released of a North Charleston police officer shooting and killing an unarmed man. This video contains graphic images.
It's the same hope held by Valerie Bell, the mother of Sean Bell, who was killed on his wedding day in 2006 by New York City police who fired 50 times into his car.
"I just hope the names don't just keep piling up, that unarmed people don't just keep getting killed," Bell said. "But there have been so many who have been killed that people don't know about."
Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, 43, who died last year after police put him in a chokehold while arresting him, said police in South Carolina did the right thing by arresting Slager and charging him with murder.
"I'm so glad in South Carolina that they took immediate action," Carr said. "That's exactly what's supposed to happen. If you start doing that to police, they will start treating us more fairly."
But a videotape is no guarantee of a conviction. A videotape of the Garner arrest shows Garner complaining he can't breathe as the officers wrestle him to the ground, but a Staten Island, N.Y., grand jury declined on Dec. 3 to indict the officer who put Garner in the hold.
Abdul Malik Talib, executive director of Families United For Social and Educational Development, a youth mentorship organization based in the Bronx, says outrage over Scott's death will be short-lived and won't be enough to change the minds of people who don't believe police intentionally mistreat members of some communities.
"It's just another emotional story," Talib said. "In six months, you won't hear about it."
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