With the qualification that these sorts of reports from the establishment alternatives might be part of a co-ordinated effort to push forward gun control, the numbers of killings of black men by police/vigilantes is the context you need to keep in mind when looking at the Zimmerman case.
This case isn’t really about race, which is how it was massaged, so much as it is about the police state, and Florida is possibly the best example of that in the US.
Not only can you have a jury of only SIX people for a murder trial (rather than the usual 12), you have the state’s ambiguously worded stand-your-ground laws, and a culture of impunity for the police.
The cops are everywhere in Florida, usually ticketing and harassing ordinary citizens over petty issues. There are too many of them. There’s too much money in the business. They have to manufacture incidents. Zimmerman had sucked in that poisonous atmosphere. He was a cop wannabe, as I said.
Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012 according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it’s possible that the real number could be much higher.
The report, entitled “Operation Ghetto Storm”, was performed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an antiracist grassroots activist organization. The organization has chapters in Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. It has a history of organizing campaigns against police brutality and state repression in black and brown communities. Their study’s sources included police and media reports along with other publicly available information. Last year, the organization published a similar study showing that a black person is killed by security forces every 36 hours. However, this study did not tell the whole story, as it only looked at shootings from January to June 2012. Their latest study is an update of this.
These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration ofnonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.
“Operation Ghetto Storm” explains why such killings occur so often. Current practices of institutional racism have roots in the enslavement of black Africans, whose labor was exploited to build the American capitalist economy, and the genocide of Native Americans. The report points out that in order to maintain the systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, the United States maintains a network of “repressive enforcement structures”. These structures include the police, FBI, Homeland Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies, along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.“