As the year is coming to an end the country is ablaze with protests, rally’s and the repeated chant of slogans such as “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice No Peace.” Police officers are being charged and tried for the deaths of the very people they are there to protect. The nation is at unrest. We’re being told to watch out for foreign terrorists but to some communities, the threat of a closer danger is focused on more. It seems in the world we live in today black males are being picked off by police more and more. In fact according to the government database of police involved homicides unarmed black people more than twice as likely to be killed by police than white people. That number is striking when you take into fact that black people only make up 13.2% of the American population.
According to The Guardian, to date 1063 people have been killed by the police in 2015. While there have been over 30 police homicides of black unarmed men in 2015 there are even more I discovered during My research where the status of if they were armed or not is still unknown.
There are a few named that we all know as black unarmed men killed by police officers like Freddie Gray, Jamar Clark and Walter Scott but there so many more. Below are 23 black, unarmed men who were shot by the police in 2015. Remember their names too.
Naeschylus Vizant age 38 Aurora, Colorado March 2015
Tony Robinson – age 19 Madison, Wisconsin March 2015
Samuel DuBose – age 43 Cincinnati, Ohio July 2015
Christian Taylor – age 19 Arlington, Texas August 2015
Eric Harris age 44 Tulsa, Oklahoma April 2015
Walter Scott age 50 North Charleston, South Carolina April 2015
Anthony Hill age 27 Chamblee, Georgia March 2015
Jeremy Lett – age 28 Florida February 2015
Lavell Hall – age 25 Miami Gardens, Florida April 2015
Frank Shepard age 41 Houston, Texas April 2015
Kris Jackson age 22 South Lake Tahoe, California June 2015
Spencer McCain age 41 Owings Mills, Maryland June 2015
Jamar Clark age 24 Minneapolis, Minnesota November 2015
Nathaniel Pickett age 29 Barstow, California November 2015
Keith Harrison McLeod age 19 Reisterstown, Maryland September 2015
Felix Kumi age 61 Mount Vernon, New York August 2015
Albert Joseph Davis age 23 Orlando, Florida July 2015
Brendon Glenn age 29 Venice, California May 2015
These names are just a few among those who died at the hands of police officers this year. They may not all have been boy scouts but they were not an immediate threat to a police officer either. We have seen people of other races commit mass murders, police assaults and killings and still manage to make it to court. Don’t our black men deserve the same?
