Saturday, May 9, 2015

Oakland Youth on Front Lines of Movement Against Police Brutality

In the wake of Michael Brown's death last August in Ferguson, Missouri at the hands of a police officer, protests erupted in the St. Louis suburb and soon spread across the country. Protesters were outraged by the shooting of the unarmed black teenager and what they called a glaring lack of accountability for the police officer, who pulled the trigger. But this was no isolated incident. One statistic that gained popularity during these protests conveyed the urgency of the struggle against police violence: every 28 hours a black person is killed in the United States by a law enforcement or private security officer. Since Brown's death, demonstrations against police brutality, mass incarceration, and racial injustice have swelled from New York to California. During that period, Oakland youth have been hard at work, developing strategies to change the ways police interact with their communities. KPFA's Andrew Klein has the story.