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America’s police broke their record (since 2013) for killing and murdering citizens in 2022. According to the Mapping Police Violence website, police killed at least 1,185 people in 2022, about 100 people every month.
If you weren’t aware of this fact don’t blame yourself. America’s white media has all but abandoned covering police violence.
The cop killing body-count for 2022 is more than the 1,145 people police killed in 2021 and more than the 1,152 police killed in 2020: the year George Floyd was murdered under Derek Chauvin’s knee in broad daylight, on an American street, in Minnesota—during COVID.
According to Mapping Police Violence, “Black people were 25% of those killed by police in 2022 despite being only 13% of the population,” and are “three time more likely to be killed by police than white people.”
We all saw the global groundswell of grassroots marches and protests against police after the knee-in-the-neck lynching of George Floyd. From Los Angeles to London, and places in between, many showed solidarity with those who are the primary targets of police murder in America: Black Americans.
The worldwide scrutiny upon American police forced politicians to pretend they would earnestly tackle this issue of racial policing. In Congress, some movements were made toward addressing the policing problem. However, meaningful restructuring of policing remains elusive because of political obstruction from those who are supported by police unions and the like.
The truth is Black Lives really don’t matter much to politicians, especially the Trumpian Republicans who now represent the conservative agenda in Congress.
Worse of all, we also have Black-skinned Benedict Arnolds sacrificing Black Lives for political power and careerist expediency.
In the U.S. Senate, there was some hope the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill would be enacted into law. However, from the time Republicans selected South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to be the point person to “negotiate” with Democrats it was clear his real mission was to use his Black skin to kill the bill and give Republicans plausible deniability.
Like a good boy, doing his Massa’s bidding, Scott torpedoed the discussions and eventually attacked the Democrats for wanting to “defund the police” and other such nonsense. But this detail is noteworthy: two policing organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), said Scott lied about why the police negotiation failed.
In a joint statement, the FOP and IACP said, in part: “Despite some media reports, at no point did any legislative draft propose ‘defunding the police.’ In fact, the legislation specifically provided additional funding to assist law enforcement agencies in training, agency accreditation, and data collection initiatives.” Of course, Scott is nothing more than an unprincipled opportunist who, like a “pig in shit,” fits right in with the Trumpian Republican Party.
In New York, we have another disturbing scenario with the city’s second Black Mayor Eric Adams, and his appointed Black female NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell. There is so much wrong with this administration.
Mayor Adams has done several things, since being elected, that make it clear he will never champion the changes needed in policing. Just last week, Adams faced justified criticisms for advancing a budget that cuts everything—except the ballooning budget the NYPD receives.
For the past couple years, the cries have been about rising crime. Some act as if they see no connection between rising crime and the stress the COVID pandemic added to the ever-widening economic inequality in the city. But instead of providing funding to fix those inequalities, Mayor Adams is proposing to decrease funding—across the board, including in education—while adding funding to the NYPD.
Because, after all why would funding necessary social programs decrease crime? The only answer for fighting crime is flooding poor Black communities with more white police right?
Last month, it was reported that Commissioner Keechant Sewell overruled over 70 CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board) rulings. In doing so, she was quoted as saying, “We should not punish good faith errors.” Sewell also announced she would change the disciplinary guidelines she characterized as “manifestly unfair.”
This is what passes for responsible Black leadership in New York City.
We shouldn’t assume Black politicians, who are police officers, to be that much different from their white blue-blood buddies and supervisors. Many of these Black officers have been taught to hate themselves by the training they get inside America’s rottenly racist policing institution.
Mayor Adams and Sewell are showing us they care about protecting police not the public in New York City.
How is it possible that more people were killed by police just a couple of years after George Floyd’s brutal murder and all the protests and marches that followed? Why has the white establishment media been MIA while the bloodletting continues unabated on our streets?
If the media had been doing its job, Americans would be aware police violence has not decreased. But perhaps their job is to whitewash things of importance to Blacks. Why is the media trying to coverup the mass murders and killings perpetrated by police? Have the police unions, and their apologist mouthpieces, been applying pressure upon the media behind the scenes?
There is much news about crime—except for the crimes cops perpetrate upon Black Americans when they brutalize and kill us. The establishment media has apparently decided the deaths of Blacks by the hands of police just doesn’t matter that much.
In 2023, Black Americans must be prepared to continue our fight against racial policing. Every Black American must remain vigilant against the legalized lynchers who patrol Black communities. We must arm ourselves with cameras, always on our person (and in our cars too) so we can continue to document and expose the murderous atrocities of white American policing.
It is our duty to publicize to the world that America’s police haven’t changed one iota since the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
