You could be next.” -Valerie Castille, Philando Castile’s mother, responding to a not-guilty verdict for the police officer who shot her son seven times in the front seat of his car.
“They've killed my son. They’ve killed my son” -Shirley Marshall Harrison, Jason Harrison’s mother, who had called emergency services to send trained officers to help her son through a mental health episode.
“They didn’t have to kill my son. They didn’t have to kill him.” -Jameilla Smiley, Ricky Boyd’s mother, breaking down in tears at a press conference following the shooting of her 20 year old son by the police.
“Mom, please stop saying cusses and screaming ‘cause I don’t want you to get shooted. I wish this town was safer. I don’t want it to be like this anymore.” - a young child of a mother who was being harassed by police officers.
American children in targeted communities now have a responsibility to be worried about the lives their own mothers because of the violence of the police force. Who can make the town safer when the people hired to ‘protect and serve’ are the ones creating danger themselves?
Every single day, parents watch their children die in the most horrific way: from the consequences of the public placing trust in a corrupt system with blood on its hands. While black citizens make up only 12% of the U.S. population, they have been killed at a higher rate than white citizens, ranging from 24%-27% of the total number of people killed by police in the last five years. Black mothers, like Valerie Castile, Jameilla Smiley, and Shirley Marshall Harrison are suffering at the hands of the system, and the fear that they live in is justified by the actions of the police.
Valerie Castille could offer no advice to black youth on how to deal with police; her son did everything right and was still killed by law enforcement.
Why is murder an inevitability? How did we get to a point where there are no protections against the people being paid to protect?
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