The year 2015 is nearly over and what have I learned during the past year? I learned that it was a difficult year for family issues. But beyond that, I learned that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I am in the twilight of my years and I am still searching for answers as to why we human beings are so inhumane to other humans.

Here in the United States, those who ostensibly have been hired to "serve and protect us" are doing exactly the opposite for a significant segment of our citizens. And it seems to be getting worse. I have written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But being a privileged white person, I have failed to recognized that there is a real war, complete with dead bodies, going on here in our own country. Police are assassinating people at alarming rates and while overall crime has been going down, the rate of murder by cop is rising. This year, nearly 1,200 people have died at the hands of police officers, most of them shot to death

Monday's Democracy Now! had a segment on the mapping of police killings of citizens which was extremely interesting. Amy Goodman interviewed Sam Sinyangwe of Campaign Zero who was excellent in laying out the problems and issues involved in police killings.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHd8NEp7lw&index=10&list=PL50BDB9BCCFAF...

We are hearing calls for police reform and better police training, but that may not be the answer to stopping the escalating rate of police killings. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic that the problem is deeper than just police reform. The deeper problem is the mindset that has taken over the American psyche.

There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, "Were they justified in shooting?" But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, "Were we justified in sending them?" At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems—homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one's children, mental illness—are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can't be every place.

While blacks make up about 12% of the total population in the United States, they are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. When the age group of 15 to 19 year old black males is segregated in the statistics, the chance of them being killed by police skyrockets to 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white males of the same age. No wonder Black Lives Matter is outraged. Every American should be outraged at these statistics.

A fairer analysis, at ProPublica, found that black males aged 15 to 19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white males in that age group. And The Washington Post reports that unarmed black men were seven times more likely to be killed by police this year than unarmed white men.

The 2014 Pro Publica analysis was based upon police shootings reported by the police departments themselves to the FBI. Since there is no legal requirement for police departments to report this data, it is terribly incomplete. Still, the racial divide is startling even with this incomplete data.

The finding that young black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police is drawn from reports filed for the years 2010 to 2012, the three most recent years for which FBI numbers are available.

The black boys killed can be disturbingly young. There were 41 teens 14 years or younger reported killed by police from 1980 to 2012. 27 of them were black; 8 were white; 4 were Hispanic; and 1 was Asian.

That's not to say officers weren't killing white people. Indeed, some 44 percent of all those killed by police across the 33 years were white.

Many of these shootings were for relatively minor transgressions such as traffic stops. What was shocking to me is how little value the police put on a human life and how brutally they react to the person with whom they are interacting. In many cases, the police act as judge, jury, and executioner.

There were 151 instances in which police noted that teens they had shot dead had been fleeing or resisting arrest at the time of the encounter. 67 percent of those killed in such circumstances were black. That disparity was even starker in the last couple of years: of the 15 teens shot fleeing arrest from 2010 to 2012, 14 were black.

Monday's non-indictment of the two police officers involved in the shooting of 12 year old Tamir Rice was shocking to me, but not to members of the black community who have seen this far too often. The video of the shooting showed that the minute the first officer jumped out of the squad car, he shot the boy. The killing of Tamir Rice occurred less than two seconds after the police car drove up. The video is both disturbing and damning.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSCftESyKyU]

By choosing not to indict Loehmann and Garmback, the grand jury "put an exclamation point on the statement that black lives don’t matter," Kirsten West Savali wrote at The Root on Monday. "That black children do not matter. That being young, black and free is a crime punishable immediately by death."

Over and over we hear police reporting that they were in fear for their lives so they shot the person. Jamelle Bouie at the Slate Magazine writes that officers must be willing to assume some risk with their jobs. (my bolding for emphasis)

Strip away the rhetoric, and McGinty has made a clear statement about police conduct: If police perceive a threat to their lives then they’ve de facto justified their actions regardless of context, even if it ends with taking the life of a child. That includes situations like the Rice shooting, where police chose to create a confrontation, rather than manage an encounter.

More broadly, police are empowered to take control of all situations by any means necessary, even those that aren’t criminal. They have no obligation to survey a situation to seek the least violent resolution. Taken together, these prerogatives—established time and again, by departments across the country—encourage police to use lethal force as the first resort.

Continuing, Bouie writes:

What we see with Tamir Rice—and what we’ve seen in shootings across the country—is what happens when the officer’s safety supercedes the obligation to accept risk. If “going home” is what matters—and risk is unacceptable—then the instant use of lethal force makes sense. It’s the only thing that guarantees complete safety from harm.

It’s also antithetical to the call to “serve and protect.” But it’s the new norm. And worse for any accountability, it sits flush with our broad sympathy with police in the courts of law and public opinion.