On Tuesday, 24-year-old Melissa Ventura was shot to death by two Yuma County sheriff’s deputies who were responding to a domestic-abuse call.
Thousands of demonstrators marched through New York City’s streets on Thursday evening to protest the police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.
Police officers in Dallas, Texas used an armed robot to kill the suspected shooter of 11 police officers on Thursday night. Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and editor and contributor to Drones and Targeted Killings: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, tells Common Dreams:
“The fact that the police have a weapon like this, and other weapons like drones and tanks, is an example of the militarization of the police and law enforcement — and goes in the wrong direction.”
Roxane Gay on Alton Sterling and when black lives stop mattering:
“I don’t know where we go from here because those of us who recognize the injustice are not the problem. Law enforcement, militarized and indifferent to black lives, is the problem. Law enforcement that sees black people as criminals rather than human beings with full and deserving lives is the problem. A justice system that rarely prosecutes or convicts police officers who kill innocent people in the line of duty is the problem. That this happens so often that resignation or apathy are reasonable responses is the problem.”
Relevant, again and again: “15 Things Your City Can Do Right Now to End Police Brutality.”
A law professor responds to student complaints about his Black Lives Matter shirt:
“There is a difference between focus and exclusion. If something matters, this does not imply that nothing else does… The Black Lives Matter movement arose in a context of evidence that they don’t.”
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