Sojourners: "When terror wears a badge."

[More Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police since 9/11 than in acts officially classified as terrorism. A recent study showed that one black man was killed every 28 hours by police, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes in 2012. The militarization of police departments nationwide and the over-policing of urban neighborhoods have had terrorizing effects on the black population. There are also programs like stop-and-frisk that make racial profiling and over-policing legal. At its peak in 2011, 685,724 people were stopped. Of those stopped 53 percent were black, 34 percent were Latino, and 9 percent were white. Eighty-eight percent of all people stopped were innocent. Gang injunctions are another method of enforcement that lead to racial profiling and the over-criminalization of youth.]http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/08/14/when-terror-wears-badge

Following the links so you don't have to (but you should.); from link the first:

The numbers are eye opening. The Justice Department, which keeps all kinds of statistics on violent crime, does not tally up individuals killed annually by police. But by combing public news reports and other sources, the Justice Policy Institute has estimated that police officers in the U.S. killed 587 people in 2012 alone. Over the course of a decade, they’ve tallied more than 5,000 people in the U.S. during that period—far more than the number of people who lost their lives in acts officially classified as terrorism in roughly the same span.

Update: in memory of Eric Garner

Update to below: Whiter than thou CNN has token note of plethora of young black men getting shot by the police, running a video of black parents talking about "The Talk."

You might get to mouth off to a cop if you have white skin and your pants don't sag but wouldn't try it as a kid of colour.  Don't mouth off; speak respectfully; always dress well, no cap turned sideways; don't run away from the cops.  You'll note some of these rules apply to young pigment challenged male youth.  Yet they apply doubly so for black kids.

"How many more?"    Ezell Ford: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/13/steven-lerman-ezell-ford-shooting_n_5676937.html

The media has already forgotten about the death of Eric Garner, what with the furor over the death of Michael Brown, a Ferguson, MO teenager shot in the back fleeing from police.


Eric Garner, put in police chokehold and killed.