by Robert Emmett Murphy Jr.
Nationwide, in the last four months, there have been four police killings of unarmed blacks:
Tamir Rice
The youngest victim was 12 years old (Cleveland, Ohio)
Two were not engaged in any criminal behavior (Cleveland, Ohio and New York, New York)
Another one was guilty of only the most trivial of misdemeanors (a second incident in New York, New York).
Only one was engaged in any kind of violent behavior. He was shot at a range of 35 feet and the majority of witnesses stated he was trying to surrender (Ferguson, Missouri).
Also notable, only one of the above involved police investigating what was potentially a felony (that was not the Ferguson case, which initiated with a stop for jaywalking, but the Cleveland case, where a child playing with a toy gun resulted in a 911 call).
In each and every case, none of these men or boys should’ve died.
Michael Brown
In each and every case, the police engaged in some action or actions that escalated the situation, instead of de-escalated it (this is true in the case of Ferguson even if you accept the officer’s story as an honest accounting of the incident; as it happens, I do not believe the officer’s account). Put another way, all these deaths are more the consequence of the choices made by the person who lived than the person who died.
Death of Eric Garner
Though, in a longer view, police killings have declined (according to the CDC, police killings of Blacks specifically has declined 70% over the last fifty years, down to about seven deaths per one million individuals), the tragedies of the last three months are proof enough that we desperately need to rethink policing, specifically in how it relates to low income communities and citizens of color (even with the drop noted above, the same CDC report demonstrates that Blacks are seven times more likely to be killed by a cop than Whites, and one other ethnic minority group, Native Americans, are even more subject to police killings than Blacks).
Funeral of Eric Garner
Two reforms are obvious: 1) mandatory police body cameras (in cities where they are already in use, Use of Force incidents have dropped significantly, but also worth noting is that complaints about the improper Use of Force have dropped even more precipitously than the incidents themselves); and 2) local prosecutors clearly should not handle the Use of Force cases involving the local police forces that they need to maintain a good working relationship with (in the Ferguson case, during the Grand Jury hearing, Prosecutors had the Officer under Oath, but failed to cross-examine him; the same charge has been leveled against the Prosecutors in the second of the New York cases, but without the transcripts being made public, these claims can’t be confirmed).
Law enforcement is inherently confrontational; the defining element of its daily interactions with strangers is the power of arrest. Moreover, law enforcement has become increasingly confrontational in the last two decades as dropping crime rates have been correlated with the application of the strategies of the “Broken Windows” policing philosophy. (The “Broken Windows” approach to policing is the notion that cracking down heavily on minor crimes will reduce disorder in the community which, in turn, will result in far fewer serious crimes.
Though “Broken Windows” has been given credit by some critics, it is actually difficult to establish a real causative relationship. Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld wrote in “Crime Decline in Context” (2002), “Homicide rates also have decreased 
sharply in cities that did not noticeably alter their policing policies, such as Los Angeles, or that instituted very different changes from those in New York, such as San Diego.” Now, in response to the two New York deaths, evidence of disproportionate punishments for Blacks for minor crimes which Blacks commit in numbers roughly equal to Whites, and other pressures, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton has promised a series of reforms that seem to re-arrange, if not dismantle, many of the tactics associated with “Broken Windows.” This is especially significant because two decades ago, Bratton was essentially the father of “Broken Windows” being applied in real-world policing.
Rumain Brisbon
I wrote this Thursday night. I put it aside because I was struggling to compose a concluding paragraph. I woke up Friday morning to see there had been another Police killing of an unarmed black man, this time in Phoenix, Arizona.
That makes it five in four months.