You Call That News?

There have been so many issues I wanted to write about that I got overwhelmed. And ended up writing nothing. There is probably a clever blogging term for this circumstance.

Anyway, I will get started with this piece from Colorlines:

This summer ColorLines and The Chicago Reporter conducted a joint national investigation of fatal police shootings in America’s 10 largest cities, each of which had more than 1 million people in 2000. Several striking findings emerged.

To begin, African Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications investigated.

The contrast was particularly noticeable in New York, San Diego and Las Vegas. In each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed by police was at least double that of their share of the city’s total population.

"There is a crisis of perception where African American males and females take their lives in their hands just walking out the door," said Delores Jones-Brown, interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.

Although it is dangerous to be Black in America, it is now less dangerous to be Black in D.C. than it used to be:

Washington, D.C., which had the nation’s highest rate of police shootings during the 1990s, has cut the rate of shootings dramatically through a combination of training and accountability.

Not surprisingly, holding the police accountable makes a big difference.