Facts: A Black man was shot by a Kenosha police officer and is now paralyzed from the waist down. And people demanding #JusticeForJacobBlake have been gunned down—two are dead—after white militias were allowed by the Kenosha Police to roam city streets.
apnews.com/97a0700564fb52…
apnews.com/97a0700564fb52…
Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that armed people had been patrolling the city’s streets in recent nights, but he did not know if the shooter was among them. “They’re a militia,” Beth said. “They’re like a vigilante group.”
The investigation that proceeds from this point will have to ask and answer many questions. One of them is this: When an armed vigilante group is “patrolling the city’s streets” at a tense and perilous moment, shouldn’t we all recognize that this heightens the tension and peril?
This is bigger than one city or one moment. This involves gun laws that must be changed and police tactics and strategies. But it goes beyond those issues. There has to be an honest acknowledgment of structural racism and a determination to address it.
And there has to be steady and honest recognition that what happened on Sunday night to Jacob Blake in Kenosha is evidence of a deep and ongoing crisis in a country that has failed for too long to protect Black lives.
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