On December 23 Police are dispatched to a department store after receiving reports of a violent man beating up customers at the store with a heavy bike lock.
One of the police officers fires a number of shots at the assailant; unfortunately, one of the bullets misses him and penetrates a dressing room wall and killing a fourteen-year-old teenager who had been hiding there with her mother.
Shooting into a Burlington factory, basically, a store, a clothing store, is insanity. It is insanity to do so while people are shopping there.
And yet you have officers who are doing that because they aren’t thinking rationally anymore. Rational thought has gone out of the minds of many of these individuals and it has become solely, almost like a cult, like a state-sanctioned army, if you will, who is locked in arms and feels like they are being attacked from every side.
And so in order to defend themselves from these attacks, they are just getting more and more violent and aggressive.
Nicholas Ayala, ANTICONQUISTA, Editor
She was the fifth person to have been killed by LAPD officers in a nine-day period. The sixth victim sustained injuries but survived. None of these victims of police “insanity” were armed with any weapons.
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The incident during Christmas sparked outrage and criticism at what the United States’ largest police departments do. The Los Angeles Police Department in 2021 had killed more than double the number of civilians it had in 2020. Activists believe the rise in the number of fatalities is because the officers are rarely if ever, held to account for their actions.
The death of African American George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis Police officer in May 2020 sent shockwaves across the United States and prompted protests against police racism and brutality.
The number of police killings remains high
In the year 2021 American police killed over 1100 people. Throughout 2021 there are only 12 dates on which the police didn’t kill anyone.
Over the past year, 27% of the victims have been African American while the minority group only constitutes 13% of the US population.
… what the police are trying to show here through these killings, and it’s not just through the killings, but through the marked increase in the number of killings from last year to this year, is that they are the ones with the power in the cities, that they are the ones with the right or the privilege to exercise their violence. They’re the ones who can shoot first and then ask questions later. They’re allowed to do that.
Nicholas Ayala, ANTICONQUISTA, Editor
In the meantime, while more murder and manslaughter charges have been brought against police officers, criminal charges and convictions have remained exceptionally rare. 98.3% of killings by police between 2013 and 2020 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.
So, on the one hand, even though you’re seeing some of the officers get away with the violent acts that they’re committing, and other ones you know, get arrested and get sent to prison for the crimes that they committed.
Either way, the other officers were watching all this happen, who are watching the attacks from the mainstream media or watching the attacks from the population from the civilians, and who are watching this now.
They’re their fellow brethren, be locked up for crimes that, you know they’ve either witnessed or committed themselves.
This is causing a sort of defensiveness on the part of police here in the United States where they’re uniting over their brotherhood in terms of being police officers before even uniting over, you know, with their brother, their nationality before even what it means to be an American before what it even means to be a human being.
Nicholas Ayala, ANTICONQUISTA, Editor
The families who have lost a member to police violence in the US are demanding justice and accountability, however, even if justice is served, the victims’ relatives will have to live with the sobering thought that their loved ones shall never return.
