We are less than 70 years into the Civil Rights Era, which started with the passage of laws that attempted to establish that Black people were full humans, entitled to such extravagant privileges as voting, eating in restaurants, getting a job, and receiving an education.

But in that time we have consistently failed to actually live up to those ideals. Any time we look at law enforcement practices, we find that they are unequally applied to Black people. Even while we find ourselves living in the safest period ever recorded in US History, police violence continues to rise, Black bodies continue to carry a deeply inequitable load.

Yet in case after case, whether armed or not, these murder victims are always “armed” retroactively, the Blackness of their skin making them an instant threat to law enforcement, regardless of other circumstances. Their Blackness was their crime, which called for their extra-judicial execution.

Ande Richards highlighted recent cases in NJ, where mental illness and non-white skin became a death sentence. Roughly one per year, in a state of 9 million, which could be seen as a small number, yet every case represents someone murdered by police, when they could have received care and help. The same body count could be attributed to a serial killer stalking brown and Black skinned people across NJ. Something that would likely spark panic and a well resourced investigation.

In the cases of Bernard Placide, Najee Seabrooks, Andrew Jerome Washington, Victoria Lee, and Deborah Terrell the “weapon” that justified their murder was a kitchen knife, or the remnants, or threat thereof. A knife they possessed in their own homes. Yet those knives are used to justify a death sentence, conferred by a group of cops. What stops the police from kicking in your door while you cook dinner and taking your life?

In many of these cases, those same cops forced family members away, refusing to let them help, when their loved one needed them the most. Victoria Lee was shot while surrounded by her family members, police bullets putting them at far more risk than Victoria ever did.

In many of these cases, the body cams show officers with massive ballistic shields, easily capable of deflecting kitchen knives, held by officers who seem to have spent their entire lives in the gym training to be able to overpower someone in just such an encounter.

In many of these cases, the officers force escalation, inflaming a situation that does not require violence or confrontation, a person alone, no one around them who could be injured or killed. So the cops declare the person a risk to themselves, and then proceed to kill them, before they can self-inflict a mortal wound.

Major Gulia Dale III was killed by a police department who had disarmed another veteran in crisis a few months earlier. They managed to disarm the other man even after her fired shots at the officers. The forcefield of whiteness. Gulia made no such escalation, yet he was killed, within seconds of officers exiting their vehicles. To prevent him from killing himself?

In every one of these cases, everything we’ve been told will keep us safe from police failed. Families called hospital mental health programs directly, to avoid a police response. They told responding officers they didn’t want them to confront the victim, that they could talk them into the ambulance. The officers had undergone de-escalation and mental health awareness trainings. The officers carried and deployed “less-lethal” options. And when everything else broke down, the murders were recorded on multiple body cams, from multiple angles, from start to finish.

But the system is built to protect the cops, not the citizens. The New Jersey Attorney General’s office failed to obtain even a single indictment in any of these cases. They failed to highlight even a single issue going in slow motion, frame by frame, pixel by pixel, with a convincing enough argument to the grand jury. Grand juries that are so pliant to prosecutors that they famously could “indict a ham sandwich” couldn’t be guided to finding a single fault in the police responses.

We think of these issues in terms of good guys and bad guys, or to put it frankly, black and white. But even when the officer who pulled the trigger is themselves a person of color, grand juries still see them as on the right side, the whiteness of “law and order.”

As long as that presumption of legality, of righteousness, of good persists, people of color will never be safe. Not because they’re criminal, but because they struggle with mental health just like all of us. Under our current system, fundamentally unjust at its core, the police will get their day in court, or at least in front of a grand jury. The very same constitutional right they used their state issued guns and bullets to deprive their victims of.

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Say her name by Ande Richards

The names and cities change, but the pattern has become painfully familiar: Someone experiences a mental health crisis. Police are called. The encounter ends in death.

In New Jersey, that pattern has repeated nearly every year since 2021:

July 4, 2021 — [Major Gulia Dale III], Newton: Shot within seconds of police arriving at his home during a mental health crisis. No indictment.

Sept. 3, 2022 — [Bernard Placide], Englewood: Killed after police responded while he was experiencing a mental health crisis. No indictment.

March 3, 2023 — [Najee Seabrooks], Paterson: Shot after an hours long standoff as fellow anti-violence workers sought permission to intervene. No indictment.

Aug. 27, 2023 — [Andrew Jerome Washington], Jersey City: Shot after police responded to his home during a mental health crisis. No indictment.

July 28, 2024 — [Victoria Lee], Fort Lee: Shot after her family called 911 seeking medical help during a mental health crisis. No indictment.

Aug. 8, 2025 — [Deborah Terrell], New Brunswick: Pepper-sprayed, shocked with a Taser and fatally shot after police responded to her senior apartment building. No indictment.

Black Residents Warned of Abusive Cops for Years. Then Police Shot and Killed a Toddler. by Liliana Segura

Outside the Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi, where police shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, a shrine of stuffed animals sits between the garden center and the pharmacy.

…

A handwritten sign reads, “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.”

In the parking lot, a cop pulled a gun on a gray Ford Fusion on a Sunday afternoon and fired while Kohen’s mother held him in the passenger’s seat. A bullet struck the child on his right side, tearing through his small body and exiting his left. … At 19 months old, Kohen was dead.

…

Before coming to Senatobia, he’d been named in two federal lawsuits, both of which were dismissed under the doctrine of qualified immunity.

In 2022, he was accused of providing a false narrative following the arrest of two men outside a Waffle House in neighboring Southaven. In a police report, Foster accused a driver of “almost running over” another responding officer, a description unsupported by video evidence.

… According to the 2024 complaint, the deputies tased her, “pulled her hair, kicked her multiple times in her stomach and ribs, called her a prostitute, stomped on her face breaking her jaw in three places and knocked out multiple teeth.”

A use of force report cited injuries on the woman — including “abrasion, puncture, lacerations, (and) swelling” — and confirmed that she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. …

Black Residents Warned of Abusive Cops. Then Police Shot, Killed a Toddler.

In Senatobia, Mississippi, where police killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, community members had urged leaders to rein in the police. Are they listening now?

AOC and Mamdani wanted to defund the police. Their backtracking puts organizers at risk by Derecka Purnell

Ossé and AOC did not introduce any “woke 1” legislation or resolutions that they now have to retract. Mamdani actually attempted the opposite: the racial justice working group of DSA, among others, successfully pressured him to reverse his commitment to add almost 600 more officers and $70m to the NYPD, against his campaign promise to maintain the headcount of the force. He was positioning this move while boasting historic lows for crime in the city. So unlike the students, artists, congregants and organizers I met and know, the politicians prioritized political office over political homes. …

By contrast, for example, upon receiving pushback from the “defund” framing, activists in North Carolina chose “refund Raleigh” instead as an organizing campaign strategy to explain abolition to the community, develop a public services investment strategy and secure policies that decouple public safety and police. … Still, other organizers chose more explicit “defund” campaign names as clear sites of struggle, sacrificing public palatability for political clarity.

AOC and Mamdani wanted to defund the police. Their backtracking puts organizers at risk | Derecka Purnell | The Guardian

Progressive and democratic socialist politicians are recanting pandemic-era statements on police and prison abolition

Conventional Wisdom and "Popularity" by Alec Karakatsanis

… I give the representative but fascinating example of a newspaper article about a poll in which “Defund the Police” is portrayed as unpopular in the Los Angeles Times. However, the paper simply ignored the more detailed parts of the poll in which people were asked about the underlying policies of “defund” campaigns. When asked about actual policy, overwhelming supermajorities of the population (Democratic, Independent, and Republican) all supported taking money from the police budget and giving it to various social services (70% support overall!).… The consensus view is that the empirical evidence shows that investments in things like housing, healthcare, education, and community connection are far more effective in producing safety. Thus, we have a policy issue in which the overwhelming popular opinion and scientific evidence are in accord. Seen this way, it’s an incredible achievement of propaganda that “conventional wisdom” in elite punditry is exactly the opposite.

Conventional Wisdom and "Popularity" - by Alec Karakatsanis

And a weird debate I just had.

Cops Love ICE’s New Shock Gloves. Parents Want Them Out of Schools. by Sophie Hurwitz

Despite the manufacturer’s warning against shocking children, Omaha is not the only school district to use shock gloves. Compliant Technologies regularly exhibits its products at School Resource Officer conferences nationwide. In July of this year, they were listed as an exhibitor at both the Texas and Mississippi Associations of School Resource Officers’ annual “school safety” conferences.

“I wish the adults in the room would actually just pay attention to what the students are saying, and hopefully understand that hurting students, and using weapons against them, is not what teaching is about, and it’s not what school is supposed to be about,” Omaha Central High School student Lux Tipton said at this week’s school board meeting.

Cops Love ICE’s New Shock Gloves. Parents Want Them Out of Schools. – Mother Jones

Omaha requested 40 pairs of the gloves for just under $66,000 in 2025.