He often casts heavily black American cities as dystopian war zones. In a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump said, “Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.” Trump also said to black voters: “You’re living in poverty; your schools are no good; you have no jobs.”

Jim Crow sent a message that whites were superior to other races, particularly the black race, in all ways, including behavior, intelligence, morality, and social status.

According to Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, Baltimore has paid out “almost $6 million in police brutality settlements in the course of a few years.” And it’s not only in Baltimore. Other cases are now familiar: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Harris. Too many African Americans, especially boys and men, are shot by police: in the back, unarmed, after stops for minor violations. Until the justice system can demonstrate that it holds all people, black and white, police and civilian, equally accountable for their actions, we won’t be able to get beyond the reality that racism—systemic racism—is involved.

Unfair racial stereotypes have taken root in the hearts of people. They cause us to react to people differently—in stores, on the streets, in encounters between police and citizens.

Racism is more than what is in the heart of an individual person at the moment of a particular act. Racism is the cumulative history of all those thoughts and acts. They add up to a pattern in which people of color are routinely and systematically treated differently than white people.

The Post found that 34 percent of the unarmed people killed in 2016 were black males,

U.S. police killed at least 258 black people in 2016, according to a project by The Guardian that tracks police killings in America.

136 Black people have been killed by U.S. police in 2016.

Hitting bad police in their pocketbooks: if officers had to carry their own insurance, police violence would plummet

In 2015, New Yorkers were stopped and frisked by police 22,939 times; 83 percent of those stopped were black or Latino.

With the rise of social media and 24-hour news coverage, however, more cases have captured the public’s attention and more people have had the opportunity to discuss and debate the issue. I

The most famous early example of a private citizen recording such an incident occurred on March 3, 1991. From his balcony, Los Angeles resident George Holliday recorded the beating of African American taxi driver Rodney King by four white Los Angeles police officers following a high-speed car chase. Holliday sent the video to television news station KTLA, sparking a public outcry against the use of unnecessary force by police officers. The four officers were prosecuted for their actions, but three were acquitted of all charges and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the fourth.

Black individuals were 2.5 times more likely than white individuals to experience the threat of excessive force, and 1.7 times more likely than Latinos. Black people also experienced actual physical force more than twice as often as white people, and nearly twice as often as Latinos.

In November 2014, a black twelve-year-old named Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a white police officer, Timothy Loehmann, in Cleveland, Ohio, at the recreation center where Rice was playing with a pellet gun.

Police brutality can also involve psychological intimidation, verbal abuse, false arrests, and sexual abuse.

Police brutality is the use of unnecessary, excessive force by police in their encounters with civilians