More than 80 black people have been killed by police since Breonna Taylor died in March.
On August 31, Dijon Kizzee, a Black man, was shot and killed as he fled from police in Los Angeles, California. On September 2, new video emerged of Daniel Prude, a Black man, being suffocated with a “spit hood” by police in Rochester, New York, earlier this spring. On August 18, Adrian Jason Roberts, a mentally ill Black Army veteran, was killed by police serving Roberts an involuntary commitment order in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Since March 13 and the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, the police have killed 83 Black people, according to the Washington Post. Other organizations put the total even higher: The Mapping Police Violence database notes more than 100 Black people killed by police since March 13. More than likely, these deaths will usher in no legal reckoning. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, “99 percent of killings by police from 2013-2019 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.” It is this slow, steady drip of police killings that ultimately drives Black families, activists, and their allies to protest in the streets. “So many people have reached out to me, telling me they’re sorry that this happened to my family,” Letetra Wideman, Jacob Blake’s sister, said during a press conference last week. “Well, don’t be sorry. Because this has been happening to my family for a long time. Longer than I can account for. It happened to Emmett Till. Emmett Till is my family. Philando, Mike Brown. Sandra. This has been happening to my family. And I’ve shed tears for every single one of these people that it’s happened to. This is nothing new. I’m not sad. I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And I’m tired.”Independent of the news cycle, Black people are disproportionately killed by the police According to the Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer for creating the first nationwide tracker of police killings, “the rate at which Black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.
