Biased Use Of Force By American Police Forces Despicable And Shameful…

Whether a soci­ety is demo­c­ra­t­ic or total­i­tar­i­an, it needs a body to enforce the laws or decrees. We call those who do the enforc­ing ‑the police. No mat­ter how dis­gust­ed we are with the police and want them gone, what­ev­er they are replaced with will car­ry out the same func­tions. So essen­tial­ly, we would be replac­ing the police with a new police of sorts.
So it is rea­son­able to say some polic­ing body is nec­es­sary, whether to enforce the laws in a democ­ra­cy or to sup­press the pop­u­la­tion in an autocracy.
I went to lengths to estab­lish the fore­gone because we live in a soci­ety where truth and com­mon sense are in short sup­ply. Critiquing what some peo­ple wor­ship means you are anti-that body. Not that I care about their inabil­i­ty to think crit­i­cal­ly or their will­ful igno­rance. https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​m​a​s​s​i​v​e​-​e​x​p​a​n​s​i​o​n​-​o​f​-​t​h​e​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​s​t​a​t​e​-​e​n​h​a​n​c​e​d​-​b​y​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​d​e​m​o​c​r​a​t​s​-​a​n​d​-​o​t​h​e​rs/

Police are killing peo­ple at an alarm­ing rate in the United States. Each year the num­ber of peo­ple police kill is high­er than the pre­vi­ous year. The Federal Government has not demand­ed that the 18,000-plus police depart­ments across the coun­try report to it the peo­ple they kill. The Congress, with Republican majori­ties in the House and Senate at vary­ing times, will not pass leg­is­la­tion mak­ing it manda­to­ry for police to report the num­ber of peo­ple they kill each year accu­rate­ly. Notwithstanding, as a result of pub­lic out­cry and demand for account­abil­i­ty, var­i­ous Organizations and News Organizations have start­ed keep­ing coun­ty, using death records, etc, to present to the peo­ple an idea of the body count each year.
In 2021, there were 1,048 police fatal shoot­ings. In 2022, there were 1,096 fatal police shoot­ings. As of March 27, 2023, 238 peo­ple were killed at the hands of police, 30 of the Black, accord­ing to [sta​tista​.com]. https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​n​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​p​o​s​e​-​e​x​i​s​t​e​n​t​i​a​l​-​t​h​r​e​a​t​-​t​o​-​y​o​u​n​g​-​m​e​n​-​o​f​-​c​o​l​o​r​-​s​t​u​dy/

The University of Illinois Chicago esti­mates con­ser­v­a­tive­ly 250,000 civil­ian injuries are caused by law enforce­ment offi­cers annually.
In the U.S., dur­ing a giv­en year, an esti­mat­ed 1 mil­lion civil­ians expe­ri­ence police threat of or use of force result­ing in a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of 85,000 non-fatal injuries requir­ing hos­pi­tal treat­ment and 600‑1000 deaths. Both Black/African-Americans and Hispanics/​Latinos are twice as like­ly to expe­ri­ence the threat of or use of force dur­ing police-ini­ti­at­ed con­tact (Bureau of Justice Statistics). Based on CDC data, Black African-Americans are more than twice as like­ly to be killed and almost 5‑times more like­ly to suf­fer an injury requir­ing med­ical care at a hos­pi­tal com­pared to white non-Hispanics.
Black males com­prise 6.1 per­cent of the US pop­u­la­tion but 24.9 per­cent of all per­sons killed by police. https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​u​n​i​o​n​-​c​o​n​f​i​r​m​-​w​h​y​-​d​e​f​u​n​d​i​n​g​-​t​h​e​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​i​s​-​s​o​u​n​d​-​p​o​l​i​cy/

Fatal police shoot­ings of unarmed Black peo­ple in the US are more than three times as high as of Whites, accord­ing to the Journal of Epidemiology and com­mu­ni­ty health.
Many of the peo­ple shot and killed by American police are unarmed. As is expect­ed, unarmed blacks are killed at an alarm­ing­ly high­er rate than whites.
Having looked at the cir­cum­stances that pre­cede many of the shoot­ings, par­tic­u­lar­ly of Black cit­i­zens, sev­er­al experts have said deci­sive­ly that they could be avoid­ed. Those sen­ti­ments echo what I have writ­ten time and again. Police are com­mit­ting mur­der and are get­ting away with it because Prosecutors and Courts con­tin­ue to (a) move the goal­post as to what’s law­ful and (b) pull the wool over the eyes of the fam­i­lies of mur­dered victims.
I total­ly get the seri­ous­ness of each encounter that involves guns. Nevertheless, police offi­cers have been killing peo­ple unnec­es­sar­i­ly by (a) esca­lat­ing rather than de-esca­lat­ing minor or non-issues and (b) by con­tin­u­ing to shoot vic­tims after they are ren­dered life­less and then pre­tend­ing to ren­der first aid to the corpse after they cuff the already dead person.
As I have repeat­ed­ly said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, hav­ing been taught that the pub­lic is an ene­my and that their only focus is to go home to their fam­i­lies has turned minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties into ver­i­ta­ble bat­tle­fields for police to exact vengeance on the poor and defenseless.

They are also trained to con­tin­ue to shoot until a threat is neu­tral­ized. However, the courts have made it abun­dant­ly clear that it is not the pre­rog­a­tive of courts to Monday- morn­ing-quar­ter­back what police do in the heat of the moment.
This has opened up a pan­do­ra’s box of sub­jec­tive abuse.
The objec­tive stan­dard is now the sub­jec­tive stan­dard of every cop with a bad atti­tude and entrenched racial animus.
The con­se­quence has been dev­as­tat­ing for the Black com­mu­ni­ty; not only that cops esca­late minor infrac­tions or no infrac­tion at all to jus­ti­fy lethal force, but with the bar­bar­ic esca­la­tion of lethal force they use long after the sub­ject of their ire is down or dead.
Here are just a cou­ple of the cas­es of which I refer.
Despite what the Police, their unions, their sup­port­ers, and the com­plic­it cor­po­rate media tell you, these are unmit­i­gat­ed acts of depraved indif­fer­ence to human life.
(1) In the ear­ly hours of February 4, 1999, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean stu­dent named Amadou Diallo was gunned down by NYPD cops who fired a hail of 41 bul­lets at him; 19 of those bul­lets hit and killed him. Amadou Diallo had com­mit­ted no crime. Diallo was Black.

(2) On August 9, 2014, police offi­cer Darren Wilson shoots and kills Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenag­er, in Ferguson, Missouri, a sub­urb of St. Louis. Protests and riots ensue in Ferguson and soon spread across the coun­try. Darren Wilson fired 12 shots at Michael Brown, six of which hit and killed him. Michael Brown was Black.

(3 On October 20, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. Jason Van Dyke, a cop, fired a hail of bul­lets at Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old boy walk­ing down the street alleged­ly with a knife in his hand. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times as he walked away from police. The Chicago Police Department and then Mayor Rahm Emanuel saw the video of the mur­der yet kept it from the pub­lic for over a year until a judge ordered them to release it. Laquan McDonald was Black.

(4) An unarmed Sean Bell was shot and killed in Queens, NY by mem­bers of the New York City Police Department on the morn­ing of November 25, 2006. Sean Bell was mur­dered on the very day he was to mar­ry his fiancé.
The cops fired over 50 bul­lets into Bell’s car, claim­ing they heard some­one say, ‘yo, get my gun,’ as Bell and his friends left a night­club. They also lied that there was a fourth man in Bell’s car who might have fled with the phan­tom gun.
There was no men­tion of a fourth per­son with Sean Bell and his two friends.
New York Daily News colum­nist Juan Gonzalez report­ed that in the hours imme­di­ate­ly after the shoot­ing, there was no men­tion of a fourth man in police calls, and no search was launched for the alleged armed man. Sean Bell was Black.

(5) June 2022 Akron, Ohio Police fired 90 plus bul­lets at a flee­ing 27-year-old Jayland Walker, who they say refused to stop dur­ing a traf­fic stop. Walker was hit with 46 bul­lets, accord­ing to the coroner.
April 2023, a white grand jury returned a no true bill, mean­ing that no cop would be held account­able for the slaugh­ter of Jayland Walker.
Walker was slaugh­tered, but he did not have a gun. Police lat­er claimed that there was a gun in his car, which meant noth­ing, even if he had a gun in his car. He was slaugh­tered with­out a gun in his hand.
Needless to say, Jaylan Walker is Black.

Here is an impor­tant bit of infor­ma­tion that cer­tain politi­cians, pros­e­cu­tors, judges, and police do not want you to know the lev­el of force that police use to sub­due a sus­pect should be pro­por­tion­al to the force used by the subject.
A flee­ing sus­pect not shoot­ing at police or some­one else pos­es no risk or dan­ger to police or the pub­lic and, there­fore, can­not be law­ful­ly gunned down by police. Killing a flee­ing per­son is not only unlaw­ful, but it is also bla­tant­ly immoral and a grotesque act of sub-human bloodlust.
Every bul­let fired after that first one that caused a sus­pect to fall to the ground is an act of mur­der. But in America, it has become the norm for a sin­gle Black man to be gunned down by police, sus­tain­ing more bul­lets than it takes to kill a ful­ly grown elephant.
The dis­re­spect­ful thing about it is that they fun­da­men­tal­ly believe we are too stu­pid to see that they have mere­ly switched from wear­ing sheets to mur­der us and have donned police uni­forms to do it.

On the oth­er hand, vio­lent white mass mur­der­er like Dylan Roof was tak­en in alive and fed a fast food lunch by ador­ing cops.
The Buffalo, New York shoot­er Payton Gendron was tak­en alive with no scratch on him.
David Depape was arrest­ed alive after a vio­lent home inva­sion and attack on Paul Pelosi, the hus­band of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in San Fransisco, California.

A 21-year-old white man is accused of using a Smith & Wesson semi­au­to­mat­ic rifle to kill sev­en peo­ple and injure more than 30 dur­ing a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. A cell­phone video of his arrest shows the con­trolled actions of police fol­low­ing the car­nage to take him into cus­tody safely.

The FBI recent­ly released a report on active shoot­er inci­dents that occurred in 2021, not­ing that the gun­men were killed by police in 14 of the 61 inci­dents. In 30 cas­es, the gun­men were appre­hend­ed — most at anoth­er loca­tion after the shoot­ing — and four of those inci­dents end­ed when armed and unarmed civil­ians engaged with the shoot­er to stop the threat.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.
Check out Mike’s Podcast on Youtube @ mikebeckles