Police brutality

Black boys’ cries fall on deaf white ears and Black mothers’ tears keep graveyard grass green.

It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.
— Celisa Calacal, Journalist

The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. … The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue.
— Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, 2009

Less than two hours before she was murdered on the evening of March 14, Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco was speaking at a roundtable of black women activists about “young black women moving the structures”.

Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.
— Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
—Author William S. Burroughs

Since the FBI never inspected the DNC’s computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.
— Daniel Lazare, “NYT’s ‘Really Weird’ Russagate Story“, Consortium News

Bad Baltimore cops will have to pay back their victims themselves - instead of taxpayers; Kansas libraries are giving thousands of records to the Great 78 Project; Colorado wildlife are using crosswalks to save lives.

Bad Baltimore cops will have to pay back their victims themselves - instead of taxpayers; Kansas libraries are giving thousands of records to the Great 78 Project; Colorado wildlife are using crosswalks to save lives.

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death.