This week, Congressmember Karen Bass (D-CA) issued the following statement after Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced the Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back in August of 2020 will not be criminally charged.
The August 23 police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, WI, triggered yet another round of community protests and national news coverage of a Black man. A series of multiple gunshots fired by a local police officer, were not fatal for 29-year old Jacob Blake; but may have permanently paralyzed him from the waist down.
As we wait for law, policy and practice to catch up to the public’s savvy and changing mores on policing, Black lives will be saved from this blue menace if civilians adopt a page from the police playbook and invoke their own talismanic chant: “I’m Not Resisting.”
Democrats attending their party’s convention last week in Philadelphia were moved to tears, rounds of applause and a standing ovation when nine mothers of Black men slain by police brutality and racially motivated attacks took the stage.
Volatile, racially sensitive questions of whether to charge police officers for fatal on-duty shootings, and whether jurors will convict an officer in such a case, hang over two of Ohio’s largest cities. A Hamilton County judge is expected in February to set a trial date for a former University of Cincinnati police officer charged with murder in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black motorist after a traffic stop. Meanwhile, a Cuyahoga County grand jury has been hearing testimony about potential charges in the Cleveland police killing of a 12-year-old black boy who had a pellet gun. The cases come