As new data emerges that Police killings are the sixth leading cause of death among young men in the United States, one can reasonably expect that the conversation will be shaped in a way that absolves the police departments of responsibility.
Look for the corporate media and their talking heads to begin the duplicitous process (if at all) of presenting this existential issue as one of jobs, housing, drug-use and a plethora of issues not germane to the central point, which is police murdering black people and getting away with it.
According to the study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.
Police killings which can include shootings, choking and other uses of force are the sixth-leading cause of death among men of all races ages 25 – 29.
The risk of being killed by the police is more pronounced for black men, who are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, while black women are 1.4 times more likely than white women to be killed by police.
According to lead researcher Frank Edwards, an assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, “the numbers may be an undercount.” “While the killings of Michael Brown, 18, Charleena Lyles, 30, and other black men and women at the hands of law enforcement have brought national attention to the role race plays in police violence against Americans, researchers lack basic estimates of the prevalence of police-involved deaths, in large part because of an absence of official and authoritative data.” Said Edwards.
There is a distinct reason that there are no Federal or state mandates that police departments across the country have strict accounting of the number of people who died as a result of coming in contact with police.
The authorities know that this issue of police violence is real. However, it has largely affected black and brown people, so what’s the fuss about?
The United States keeps records of everything, including how mice procreate. That it does not see fit to have an accurate accounting of the number of people who die as a result of contact with police tells a startling tale of how the nation sees this problem.
It leaves people who care about social justice to conclude that there is no will at any level to remediate this problem.
There is a common practice in the United States to create diversionary scenarios for pressing issues.
For example, the existential crisis of gun violence and white supremacy are coined as mental health issues, rather than the serious issue of neo-nazis, hatred, and the need to put in place guarantees which would categorize and effectively deal with homegrown terrorist groups, as they have done in naming and dealing with so-called Muslim extremism.
The corporate media is complicit in shaping those fraudulent diversionary narratives as well.
In debating this issue, talking heads of all colors and stripes have fallen into the trap the corporate media has laid for protecting police from accountability.
It should come as no surprise then, that almost 15 years after the FBI warned about the influx into law enforcement of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The country has done nothing about it. Instead, it has targeted the black people demonstrating for the right to exist.
It is a remarkable scenario tantamount to a story my friend“s wife told of her love for pork.
She had a meal of pork and rice and subsequently fell ill. The doctor attributed the cause of her illness to the [pork], and so she stopped eating [rice].
James Comey, the then FBI Director, spoke to the nation’s police chiefs after Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson Missouri by a White cop, Darren Wilson.
Comey talked about what he characterized as the “Ferguson effect”.
In giving that lecture, Comey said police officers were afraid of doing their jobs, out of fear of what he called ” The Ferguson effect”.
The very FBI which warned years ago about the dangers white supremacists poses to the country, went ahead and created a fraudulent designation for the black lives matter activists who were demonstrating against the killing of black people by police.
The FBI labeled them “black identity extremists”, When challenged in a committee hearing in the congress by Congresswoman Karen Bass the new FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a convoluted response which never fully answered the congresswoman’s questions.
The FBI which now claims it does not have the means or the authority to investigate white Terrorism, certainly had the time to build out a massive surveillance infrastructure against Black lives matter activists, visiting their homes and leaving business cards, and generally harassing people who had just returned home from peacefully demonstrating which is a guaranteed first amendment right.
In the meantime, heavily armed white men are butchering Black and Latino and other minority people and there is no mass surveillance of these groups, because according to the FBI they need new tools.
Instead of paying attention to the existential threat white extremism poses to the United States, the FBI targeted black activists demonstrating for their right to exist.
The names of the murdered are far too many to document. Every year American police kill thousands of people, largely people of color. Neither the Federal Government, nor state and local authorities see a need to have police departments have any accounting data of people who have died having come in contact with police.
Even a pig farmer knows how many of his pigs have died any given year.
In America, the Government does not care enough because the people being gunned down and choked to death are “those people”, people who were disposable from the beginning of this experiment.
Mike Beckles is a former Jamaican police Detective corporal, a business owner, avid researcher, and blogger.
He is a black achiever honoree, and publisher of the blog chatt-a-box.com.
He’s also a contributor to several websites.
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