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It is better the wait until the right time

to tell someone something that is very

sensitive, then to hide it for the rest of

your life.

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go to toronto

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Go to the third incident.

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In the week since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, initial autopsy findings, police reports, and eyewitness accounts have begun to provide some insights into the circumstances of his death. But plenty of questions remain unanswered, not the least of them: Where is Officer Darren Wilson, and what's likely to happen to him?

Wilson, who was put on administrative leave after killing Brown, reportedly left home with his family a few days before his name was made public. A fundraising campaign launched on August 17 has already raised more than $10,000 to cover the financial needs of Wilson's family, "including legal fees." (The campaign has since increased its goal to $100,000.)

It remains to be seen whether Wilson will face criminal charges, but a limited review of similar killings by police suggests that the officers more often than not walk away without an indictment, and are very rarely convicted. Delores Jones-Brown, a law professor and director of the Center on Race, Crime, and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, looked at 21 publicized cases from 1994 through 2009 in which a police officer killed an unarmed black person. Of those, only seven cases resulted in an indictment-for criminally negligent homicide, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, or violation of civil rights-and only three officers were found guilty.

Let's take a closer look at five specific cases in which an unarmed black man was killed by officers while allegedly fleeing or resisting in some fashion.

City: Memphis, Tennessee
Date: October 1974
Officers: Elton Hymon and Leslie Wright
Victim: Edward Garner
What happened: Officers Hymon and Wright were responding to a burglary call when Hymon spotted Garner, an unarmed 15-year-old, by a fence in the backyard of the home in question. After Hymon ordered Garner to halt, the teenager tried to climb the fence. In response, the officer shot him fatally in the head. A federal district court ruled that the shooting was justified under a Tennessee statute-the law said that once a police officer voices intent to arrest a suspect, "the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest." Garner's father appealed, and the case ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled the Tennessee statute unconstitutional and the killing unjustified. Justice Byron White wrote for the majority: "It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect. A police officer may not seize an unarmed, non-dangerous suspect by shooting him dead." Despite the reversal, the officer who shot Hymon was never charged.

City: Bronx, New York
Date: December 1994
Officer: Francis X. Livoti
Victim: Anthony Baez
What happened: Officer Livoti choked to death 29-year-old Anthony Baez in a case that would later be featured in a PBS documentary titled Every Mother's Son. After their football struck his patrol car, Livoti had ordered Baez and his brother to leave the area. When the brothers refused, Livoti attempted an arrest. After Baez allegedly resisted, the officer administered the choke hold that ended his life. Livoti, who had been accused of brutality 11 times over 11 years, was charged with criminally negligent homicide, but found not guilty during a state trial in October 1996. He was fired the following year, however, after a judge ruled his choke hold illegal. In June 1998, a federal jury sentenced him to 7.5 years in prison for violating Baez's civil rights, and the Baez family received a $3 million settlement from the city later that year. In 2003, two more cops were fired for giving false testimony in Livoti's defense.

City: Bronx, New York
Date: February 1999
Officers: Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, Richard Murphy
Victim: Amadou Diallo
What happened: Amadou Diallo, an unarmed, 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was killed in the vestibule of his own building when four white police officers fired 41 shots, striking him 19 times. Diallo had just returned home from his job as a street vendor at 12:44 a.m. when he was confronted by the plainclothes officers. The officers later said he matched the description of a rape suspect, and that they mistakenly believed he was reaching for a gun. (He was pulling out his wallet.) Three of the officers had been involved in previous shootings, including one that led to the death of another black civilian in 1997. The four cops were acquitted of all charges, prompting citywide protests. They were not fired, either, but lost permission to carry a weapon-although one of the officers eventually had his carrying privilege restored. In 2004, Diallo's family received a $3 million settlement from the city. His mother said her son had been saving to attend college and become a computer programmer. A foundation in Diallo's name seeks to promote racial healing.

City: Los Angeles, California
Date: October 2000
Officer: Tarriel Hopper
Victim: Anthony Dwain Lee
What happened: Lee, a 39-year-old black actor who had roles in the 1997 movie Liar Liar and the TV series ER, was attending a Halloween party when the LAPD showed up, responding to a noise complaint. According to police accounts, a group of officers were searching for the party's host when they found Lee and two other men in a small room, engaged in what the police claimed looked like a drug deal. Lee, who was dressed as a devil, allegedly held up a toy pistol, whereupon Officer Hopper fired several times, wounding him fatally. The LAPD's internal review board determined that the shooting was justified because Hopper had believed Lee's pistol was real and feared for his life.

City: Oakland, California
Date: January 2009
Officer: Johannes Mehserle
Victim: Oscar Grant
What happened: Early on New Year's Day, BART transit officers responding to reports of fighting on a train detained Oscar Grant, 22, and several other men on the platform at Fruitvale Station. In an incident captured on cell phone cameras, Officer Mehserle pulled out his gun and fatally shot Grant, who was face down on the platform at the time. Mehserle later testified that he thought he was reaching for his Taser while trying to put handcuffs on Grant, who resisted. A jury found Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced him to two years in jail. He was released after serving 11 months at the Los Angeles County Jail. The episode was turned into the acclaimed 2013 feature film, Fruitvale Station.

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Here's what happens to police officers who shoot unarmed black men

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In the week since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, initial autopsy findings, police reports, and eyewitness accounts have begun to provide some insights into the circumstances of his death. But plenty of questions remain unanswered, not the least of them: Where is Officer Darren Wilson, and what's likely to happen to him?

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"It's better to be forgotten then to talk about it. Maybe telling people would give them more reason to have whites, which Belvin didn't want"-Norris, pg 95.

We included this quote because it pertains to the title of the book, by staying silent on this indecent the families children can move on from what happened to their parents .

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"This anger and mistrust, the absolute distain for members of another race, the hatred: these were the very sentiments that civil rights marchers in 1963 had tried to overcome". -Norris, pg 105.

We thought it would be important to include this quote because it demonstrates that black people were very justified in hating whites and not forgiving them. But, the civil rights marchers chose to instead of letting their hate prevent them from doing anything, to nonviolently protested in= to try and move society forward.

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Of the black males who are shot, 48% of them are under 30.

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Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it's possible that the real number could be much higher.

The report, entitled "Operation Ghetto Storm", was performed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an antiracist grassroots activist organization. The organization has chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. It has a history of organizing campaigns against police brutality and state repression in black and brown communities. Their study's sources included police and media reports along with other publicly available information. Last year, the organization published a similar study showing that a black person is killed by security forces every 36 hours. However, this study did not tell the whole story, as it only looked at shootings from January to June 2012. Their latest study is an update of this.

These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation's population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in federal prison for nonviolent drug offenses.

"Operation Ghetto Storm" explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of "repressive enforcement structures". These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is not the only group challenging police violence against African Americans. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network has been challenging the policy of stop-and-frisk in New York City, in which police officers randomly stop and search individuals for weapons or contraband. African-American and Latino men are disproportionately stopped and harassed by police officers. Most of those stopped (close to 90%) are innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Stop Mass Incarceration also organizes against the War on Drugs and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Along with the rate of extrajudicial killings, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report contains other important findings. Of the 313 killed, 124 (40%) were between 22 and 31 years old, 57 (18%) were between 18 and 21 years old, 54 (17%) were between 32 and 41 years old, 32 (10%) were 42 to 51 years old, 25 (8%) were children younger than 18 years old, 18 (6%) were older than 52, and 3 (1%) were of unknown ages.

A significant portion of those killed, 68 people or 22%, suffered from mental health issues and/or were self-medicated. The study says that "[m]any of them might be alive today if community members trained and committed to humane crisis intervention and mental health treatment had been called, rather than the police."

43% of the shootings occurred after an incident of racial profiling. This means police saw a person who looked or behaved "suspiciously" largely because of their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect before killing them. Other times, the shootings occurred during a criminal investigation (24%), after 9-1-1 calls from "emotionally disturbed loved ones" (19%) or because of domestic violence (7%), or innocent people were killed for no reason (7%).

Most of the people killed were not armed. According to the report, 136 people or 44%, had no weapon at all the time they were killed by police officers. Another 27% were deaths in which police claimed the suspect had a gun but there was no corroboration to prove this. In addition, 6 people (2%) were alleged to have possessed knives or similar tools. Those who did, in fact, possess guns or knives were 20% (62 people) and 7% (23 people) of the study, respectively.

The report digs into how police justify their shootings. Most police officers, security guards, or vigilantes who extrajudicially killed black people, about 47% (146 of 313), claimed they "felt threatened", "feared for their life", or "were forced to shoot to protect themselves or others". George Zimmerman, the armed self-appointed neighborhood watchman who killed Trayvon Martin last year, claimed exactly this to justify shooting Martin. Other justifications include suspects fleeing (14%), allegedly driving cars toward officers, allegedly reaching for waistbands or lunging, or allegedly pointing a gun at an officer. Only 13% or 42 people fired a weapon "before or during the officer's arrival".

Police recruitment, training, policies, and overall racism within society conditions police (and many other people) to assume black people are violent to begin with. This leads to police overacting in situations involving African-American suspects. It also explains why so many police claimed the black suspect "looked suspicious" or "thought they had a gun". Johannes Mehserle, the white BART police officer who shot and killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant in January 2009, claimed Grant had a gun, even though Grant was subdued to the ground by other officers.

Of the 313 killings, the report found that 275 of them or 88% were cases of excessive force. Only 8% were not considered excessive as they involved cases were suspects shot at, wounded, or killed a police and/or others. Additionally, 4% were situations were the facts surrounding the killing were "unclear or sparsely reported". The vast majority of the time, police officers, security guards, or armed vigilantes who extrajudicially kill black people escape accountability.

***

Over the past 70 years, the "repressive enforcement structures" described in the report have been used to "wage a grand strategy of 'domestic' pacification" to maintain the system through endless "containment campaigns" amounting to "perpetual war". According to the report, this perpetual war has been called multiple names - the "Cold War", COINTELPRO, the "War on Drugs, the "War on Gangs", the "War on Crime", and now the "War on Terrorism". This pacification strategy is designed to subjugate oppressed populations and stifle political resistance. In other words, they are wars against domestic marginalized groups. "Extrajudicial killings", says the report, "are clearly an indispensable tool in the United States government's pacification pursuits." It attributes the preponderance of these killings to institutionalized racism and policies within police departments.

Paramilitary police units, known as SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, developed in order to quell black riots in major cities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, during the 1960s and '70s. SWAT teams had major shootouts with militant black and left-wing groups, such as the Black Panther Party and Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1969 and 1974, respectively. SWAT teams were only used for high-risk situations, until the War on Drugs began in the 1980s. Now they're used in raids -- a common military tactic -- of suspected drug or non-drug offenders' homes.

The War on Drugs, first declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, was largely a product of U.S. covert operations. Anti-communist counter-revolutionaries, known as the "Contras", were trained, funded, and largely created by the CIA to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the 1980s. However, the CIA's funding was not enough. Desperate for money, the Contras needed other funding sources to fight their war against the Sandinistas. The additional dollars came from the drug trade. The late investigative journalist Gary Webb, in 1996, wrote a lengthy series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News, entitled "Dark Alliance", detailing how the Contras smuggled cocaine from South America to California's inner cities and used the profits to fund their fight against the Sandinista government. The CIA knew about this but turned a blind eye. The report received a lot of controversy, criticism, and tarnishing of Webb's journalistic career, which would lead him to commit suicide in 2004. However, subsequent reports from Congressional hearings and other journalists corroborated Webb's findings.

Moreover, major banks, such as Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) and HSBC have laundered money for drug dealers. Therefore, the very threat that the Drug War claims to eliminate is perpetuated more by the National Security State and Wall Street than by low-level street dealers. But rather than go after the bigger fish, the United States has used the pretext of the "war on drugs" to implement draconian police tactics on marginalized groups, particularly poor black communities.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act, which provided civilian police agencies equipment, training, and advising from the military, along with access to military research and facilities. This weakened the line between the military and civilian law enforcement established by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a Reconstruction-era law forbidding military personnel from enforcing domestic laws. Five years later, in 1986, Reagan issuedNational Security Decision Directive 221, which declared drug trafficking a national security threat to the United States. This militarized the U.S. approach to drugs and overall policing. Additionally, the global war on terror and growth of the National Security State expanded this militarization of domestic police under the guise of "fighting terrorism".

The adoption of military tactics, equipment, training, and weapons leads to law enforcement adopting a war-like mentality. They come to view themselves as soldiers fighting against a foreign enemy rather police protecting a community. Nick Pastore, a former Police Chief of New Haven, Connecticut from 1990 to 1997, turned down military equipment that was offered to him. "I turned it all down, because it feeds a mind-set that you're not a police officer serving a community, you're a soldier at war," he told the New York Times. He said "tough-guy cops" in his department pushed for "bigger and more hardware" and "used to say, 'It's a war out there.'" Pastore added, "If you think everyone who uses drugs is the enemy, then you're more likely to declare war on the people." Mix this war-like mentality with already existing societal anti-black racism and the result is deadly. Black people, who, by default, are assumed to be criminals because of their skin color, become the victims of routine police violence.

The fact that a black person is killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante every 28 hours (or less) is no random act of nature. It is the inevitable result of institutional racism and militaristic tactics and thinking within America's domestic security apparatus.

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1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes: America Is Perpetually at War with Its Own People

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From the war on drugs to the war on terror, law enforcement's battle against minorities serves as pacification. Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was kill

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The Birmingham economy flourished in WWll but resources like cotton, wood, corn and wheat were scare. In addition to all of this, so was menswear. Thousands of returning vets had to trade their clothes for civilian wear. But, the stores couldn't get their hands on enough. "If returning white soldiers had a hard time finding clothes, then the difficulty was compounded for black veterans". At the time, segregation was kept in place because of fear of crossing the color line, white people would be shammed and lose dignity, and black people would be arrested and/or shot. Then, she goes on to talk about the shooting. It was brought up at a family funeral, where someone was "blabbering on about it". At first Michele's mother dismissed it and didn't believe it, and Michele wanted to hear more but was quiet. Then she started asking around, but it was really hard for her to find info from her family. Then she called Julia, asking if she knew anything of the incident. But she didn't know anything. Then Michele asked her how was life in Birmingham, and she told a story of when her family was walking home from church in all white and white teens threw tomatoes at them and ruined the suits. At the end of the conversation, Julia told Michele to get a hold of Morris B, and he described the shooting. John Beaton, Belvin Norris and Woody had gone to a small get together at a local park, and were then headed to a party at the Beaux Arts Temple in downtown. As they were about to get on the elevator, a cop put him arm and baton in their war. Belvin then hit his arm out of the way and got on. Then a scuffle ensued and another police officer reached for his holster. Belvin tried to stop the officer from reaching his gun, but he managed to get it out of his holster. Then, he pointed the gun at Belvins chest. Then, Woody tried to swat the gun out of the police officers hand. Then, the three were struggling for the gun, and a shot managed to be fired, just grazing Belvin's leg. From there they were arrested and sent to jail. Once news reached Avenue G, Grandma Frannie called a lawyer and got them released. As soon as they got out, the first thing they wanted to do was to go north.