Police violence in the US is out of control. It's always painted as a racial issue too, but 50% of people killed by police are white, so it really affects everyone. We have around 1100 people killed by police a year, a number that has slowly been dropping in the last few years thankfully, but it still looks ridiculous compared to the UK and France and Germany and Switzerland combined, which see police kill around 6 people a year in a combined total. Our 1100 a year is more akin to Brazil's 6000 a year than it is to most of the developed world.

Our police training is bad, and too short. They're trained to minimize liability (dead people don't testify) rather than to de-escalate situations. They have max IQ caps and the supreme court ruled that as legal. They hire from the army, creating confusion between military behavior and police behavior. They're equipped with free military equipment, with the stipulation they must use it within 6 months or return it. So they find reasons to use it. This is also how the military-industrial complex maintains high sales during the rare non-war years.

The whole thing is a mess. And most people don't even see it or understand it at all. I've been talking about this stuff years before BLM was even a thing. It needs to change. But people need to want it to change, and I don't know why I care about this stuff so much and so few others seem to care much beyond surface details.

Thanks for posting this. Shining a light on injustice is one way to generate pressure to change it.