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Following high-profile police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, fatal attacks on officers by anti-police gunmen and more recently protests in North Carolina after the police shooting of Keith Scott, a black man the United States is being forced to confront its deep-rooted problems with race and inequality.

A strong narrative is emerging from these tragedies of racially motivated targeting of black Americans by the police force. It is backed up by a new report on the city of Baltimore by the Department of Justice, which has found that black residents of low-income neighbourhoods are more likely to be stopped and searched by police officers, even if white residents are statistically more likely to be caught carrying guns and drugs.

In the background, a campaign called Black Lives Matter celebrated its third anniversary. The movement, perhaps best known by its hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, grew in protest against police killings of black people in the United States. It has now crossed the Atlantic, with events and rallies held in the United Kingdom.

What is Black Lives Matter?

The movement was born in 2013, after the man who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, was cleared of his murder. A Californian activist, Alicia Garza, responded to the jurys decision on Facebook with a post that ended: Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. The hashtag was born, and continued to grow in prominence with each new incident and protest.

The formal organization that sprung from the protests started with the goal of highlighting the disproportionate number of incidences in which a police officer killed a member of the black community. But it soon gained international recognition, after the death of Michael Brown in Missouri a year later.

Black Lives Matter now describes itself as a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of black life. It has developed to include the issues of black women and LGBT communities, undocumented black people and black people with disabilities.

According to this article in the Washington Post, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since the beginning of 2015. A cursory glance at the numbers reveals nothing to indicate racial bias: 732 of the victims were white and 381 were black (382 were of another race).

In fact, on the surface, these figures suggest its more likely for a white person to be shot by a police officer than a black person. But proportionally speaking, this isnt the case.

Almost half of the victims of police shootings in the US are white, but then, white people make up 62% of the American population. Black people, on the other hand, make up only 13% of the US population yet 24% of all the people killed by the police are black.

Furthermore, 32% of these black victims were unarmed when they were killed. Thats twice the number of unarmed white people to die at the hands of the police.

After adjusting for population percentage, this is the picture: black Americans are two and a half times more likely than white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

However, we have to count for distortion of the data, for various reasons. Firstly, it is collected through the voluntary collaboration of police departments with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so not the full picture. Also, police departments dont always identify a shooting if an officer has been involved. Additionally, police-involved shootings that are under investigation are only counted once the investigation has concluded, so many recent incidents are not being counted.

Dont other lives matter too?

The slogan Black Lives Matter, created as a riposte to the institutional racism that lingers on inside the American justice system, has met with its own controversy. Objectors have taken it to mean black lives matter more. The All Lives Matter campaign, for instance, is one among several groups that have sprung up to argue that every human life, not just those of black people, should be given equal consideration.

In the wake of the mass shooting of five police officers in Dallas in July, a new campaign has taken root. Blue Lives Matter, a national organization made up of police officers and their supporters, places the blame for what they see as a war on cops squarely at the feet of the BLM movement and the Obama administration.

But while the data tells a more positive story that the average number of police officers intentionally killed each year has in fact fallen to its lowest level during Barack Obama's presidency hate crime is still a daily reality in the US, and many feel that state-wide policies to curb it should be extended beyond the black community to include the police themselves. Police officers are a minority group, too, former police officer Randy Sutton, a spokesperson for the Blue Lives Matter campaign has been quoted as saying.

Back in Dallas, Chief of Police David Brown has been praised for his efforts to increase transparency and community-friendly policing. He has been credited with a reduction in police-related shootings and fewer complaints about the use of force by police officers.

In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement launched Campaign Zero, a group lobbying for changes to policies and laws on federal, state and local levels.

"We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country," the group writes on the Vision Zero website. "We can live in a world where the police don't kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions and ensuring accountability."

What next for Black Lives Matter?

So far, the media has focused on the campaigns events and protests on the street, but Black Lives Matter has also been involved in campaigning to change legislation.

As recently as August this year, the movement released more than 40 policy recommendations, including the demilitarization of law enforcement, reparation laws, the unionization of unregulated industries and the decriminalization of drugs.

Its efforts prior to that have had some success. One example is the creation of a civilian oversight board in St Louis City, which reviews and investigates citizens complaints and allegations of misconduct against the police.

Building on the legacy of the civil rights and LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter has created a new mechanism for confronting racial inequality. The movement also draws on feminist theories of intersectionality, which call for a unified response to issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality.

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The Black Lives Matter movement explained | World Economic Forum

First published by the Washington Examiner Sept. 3.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been feted repeatedly at the White House and honored at the Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton has incorporated its claims about racist, homicidal cops into her presidential campaign pitch.

This summers assassinations of police officers havent slowed the anti-cop demonstrations or diminished the virulent hatred directed at cops during those protests.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refuses to stand for the national anthem to protest the alleged oppression of blacks, while pop singer Beyonc has made the Black Lives Matter movement the focal point of her performances.

Yet the Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie. The idea that the United States is experiencing an epidemic of racially driven police shootings is false and dangerously so.

The facts are these: Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Posts database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict.

Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in Americas 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the citys population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the NYPD. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the citys population.

In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects in 2015 were black, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though theyre a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the citys residents.

Gang shootings occur almost exclusively in minority areas. Police use of force is most likely in confrontations with violent and resisting criminals, and those confrontations happen disproportionately in minority communities.

But the Black Lives Matter narrative has nevertheless had an enormous effect on policing and public safety, despite its mendacity. Gun-related murders of officers are up 52 percent this year through Aug. 30 compared to last year. The cop assassinations are only a more extreme version of the Black Lives Matter-inspired hatred that officers working in urban areas encounter on a daily basis.

Officers are routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they try to conduct a street investigation or make an arrest. Resistance to arrest is up, officers report. Cops have been repeatedly told by President Obama and the media that pedestrian stops and public order enforcement are racist. In consequence, they are doing less of those discretionary activities in high-crime minority communities.

The result? Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations. Homicides in 2015 rose anywhere from 54 percent in Washington, DC, to 90 percent in Cleveland. In the nations 56 largest cities, homicides rose 17 percent in 2015, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. In the first half of 2016, homicides in 51 large cities were up another 15 percent compared to the same period last year.

The carnage has continued this year. In Chicago alone, at least 15 children under the age of 12 have been shot in the first seven months of 2016, including a 3-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life following a Fathers Day drive-by shooting. While the world knows Michael Brown, whose fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., spurred Black Lives Matter, few people outside these childrens immediate communities know their names. Black Lives Matter activists have organized no protests to stigmatize their assailants.

For the past two decades, the country has been talking about phantom police racism in order to avoid talking about a more uncomfortable truth: black crime. But in the era of data-driven law enforcement, policing is simply a function of crime. The best way to lower police-civilian contacts in inner-city neighborhoods would be for children to be raised by their mother and their father in order to radically lower the crime rate there.

Heres a broader look at violent crime across the country:

Heather Mac Donald is the author of the newly released The War on Cops.

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The lies told by the Black Lives Matter movement

The pandemic added its own accelerant to the mix. For roughly three months before Mr. Floyds death, Americans were living in a state of hypervigilance and anxiety, coping with feelings of uncertainty, fear and vulnerability things many black Americans experience on a regular basis. Information about how to avoid the virus was distressingly sparse and confusing as local and federal officials sparred about the severity of the pandemic and how best to contain it.

Meanwhile, a clearer and bleaker picture of the country began to emerge. The spoils of privilege among some was in stark contrast to the lack of it among others. While some Americans fled cities to second homes, millions of others filed for unemployment and formed lines at food banks. Empathy for the plight of essential workers, a category in which black people are overrepresented, swelled tremendously. Data revealed that black and Latinx communities were being disproportionately ravaged by the pandemic.

At the same time, social distancing meant much of daily life school, work, meetings, parties, weddings, birthday celebrations was migrating to screens. It seems wed just created newfound trust and intimacy with our phones and computers when the gruesome parade of deaths began a procession across them. Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and killed in Glynn County, Ga., on Feb. 23. Breonna Taylor was in bed when the police entered her apartment and sprayed her with bullets in Louisville, Ky., on March 13. Nina Pop was found stabbed to death in Sikeston, Mo., on May 3. Tony McDade was gunned down by the police in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 27.

By the time outrage and despair over Mr. Floyds death filled our feeds, the tinderbox was ready to explode.

If the country had been open per usual, some organizers told me, the distractions of pre-pandemic life might have kept people from tuning into the dialogues online. Several said this is the most diverse demonstration of support for Black Lives Matters that they can recall in the movements seven-year history. On May 28, Twitter told me, more than eight million tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter were posted on the platform. By comparison, on Dec. 4, 2014, nearly five months after Eric Garner died at the hands of a police officer on Staten Island, the number of tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter peaked at 146,000.

Finally, theres the sheer volume of video documentation of the police atrocities at the protests themselves, which has only served to reaffirm critiques of unbridled uses of force and underscore the cognitive dissonances.

Our social feeds have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia: in a park in the nations capital, peaceful protesters dispersed with chemical irritants and smoke canisters, clearing a path for the president, who then posed for a photograph nearby. In Philadelphia, police officers pelting demonstrators trapped on the side of a highway with canisters of tear gas. In New York, two police vehicles accelerating into a crowd. In Atlanta, police officers breaking into a car and tasering two black college students. Every day, people with cameras have offered a raw and terrifying supplement to television and newspaper coverage.

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Why Black Lives Matter Has New Momentum - The New York Times

The activists who have flooded city streets since the death of George Floyd all broadly agree on the systemic injustice that has caused the nationwide uprising. They all want to end mass incarceration, dismantle structural racism and end the police killings of black men and women across the country.

But tactical differences have emerged between different camps of activists in the seven years since Black Lives Matter first became a national rallying cry. Some activists have adopted a reformist approach, pushing successfully to equip cops with body cameras, require implicit-bias training and encourage community policing. Others, seeing those measures fail to reduce the number of black deaths at the hands of police, are pushing for more aggressive strategies that weaken or eliminate police altogether. All these activists are committed to the same ends, but they dont all agree on the means.

There are three broad and overlapping camps within the vast, decentralized network of activists that make up the movement for racial justice in America. The first advocates for a series of reforms to create more accountability for police departments and strictly regulate the use of force, informed by what has and has not worked in the past. The second is increasingly focused on defunding police departments, directing taxpayer money away from law enforcement and towards social services that benefit black communities. The last also aims to redirect funding away from police departments, but considers it a step towards an ultimate goal of abolishing policing altogether.

Some of the leaders in the reform camp banded together after the Ferguson protests to form organizations like Campaign Zero. In 2014, we were in the early stage of learning the solutions. We knew to protest, but we didnt know the answers, says Deray Mckesson, civil-rights activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero. We knew things that had worked here and there, but we didnt know what could be a scaled solution.

Over the last six years, McKesson says, Campaign Zero has learned what doesnt work. More body cameras, community policing, mental health support for officers, implicit bias training, and having more police officers of color are all reforms that have been tried in various departments. But they dont actually result in fewer people being killed by police, Mckesson says. I think that there was a period of time where people thought training might be helpful, community policing might be helpful, he says. There is a consensus now that those things dont work.

Instead, Mckesson says, Campaign Zero is focused on strategies that both reduce the power and shrink the role of existing police departments. One step is getting rid of police-union contracts, he says, which often protect bad cops and prevent police chiefs and mayors from making significant reforms. A 2018 study from the University of Chicago found that after Florida sheriffs offices were allowed to unionize, violent misconduct such as use-of-force incidents increased 40% (off a very low base, the researchers said). University of Chicago law professor Dhammika Dharmapala, who co-authored the study, said that the findings suggested a large proportionate increase once an agency has the right to unionize.

Campaign Zero has identified a set of eight specific use-of-force policies that, when taken together, could reduce police violence by more than 70%, according to the group. They include banning chokeholds and strangleholds; requiring de-escalation; requiring officers to issue a warning before shooting; exhausting all other means before shooting; requiring officers to intervene and stop excessive force by other officers and report them immediately; banning shooting at moving vehicles; developing regulations governing when force can be used; and requiring officers to file reports every time they use force.

Already, the hashtag #8CantWait has gone viral on social media, as activists call their local leaders to demand these specific reforms. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Jack Dorsey have come out in support, and Campaign Zero says it has heard from government officials in San Antonio, Houston, and Los Angeles. Advocates of this approach note that unlike long fights over budget cuts, many of these policies can be implemented immediately. The police are here today, Mckesson says. And today they can have less power.

But other activists are skeptical that reforms will be enough to stem the violence. Some have pointed out that versions of some of these policies have been implemented in cities across the country, and yet black people continue to die. Theres a growing sense inside much of the movement that police are inherently violent and racist, that no amount of reform will ever solve the problem, and that a true solution requires rethinking policing altogether.

Instead, these activists say, police departments need to be either significantly defunded or even abolished altogether. The taxpayer dollars spent on policing, they argue, need to be redirected to social programs that could strengthen black communities or stop violence before it starts.

Alicia Garza, founder of the Black Futures Lab and one of the women who coined the phrase #BlackLivesMatter, says that even after 26 criminal-justice reform laws passed in 40 states since 2013, not much has changed. About a thousand people are killed at the hands of police every year, according to MappingPoliceViolence.org, and the victims are still disproportionately black. Thats why Garza believes true change entails stemming the flow of taxpayer money to police.

Overwhelmingly, the largest percentage of most city budgets and state budgets is relating to policing and militarism, says Garza. Every machine that you see on the streets costs hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be used for affordable housing, coronavirus testing and resilience support.

The law-enforcement presence at the nationwide protests has showcased the immense resources funneled to local police departments, even as doctors and nurses were left to fight COVID-19 without enough equipment or supplies. To that end, activists and major institutions have been calling for major reductions in police funding in city budgets. The ACLU recently called to defund law enforcement and reinvest in communities of color. After pushing for raises for police officers, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti now says he plans to make cuts to the police budget. In New York, activists are calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to slash the NYPDs $6 billion budget.

Some of the activists calling for defunding police departments see it as a step towards the ultimate goal of abolishing police altogether. There shouldnt even be a moderate Democrat right now who doesnt believe that we should be taking resources from police departments and reinvesting them in building black futures, says Jessica Byrd, founder of ThreePoint Strategies, who leads the electoral-justice project at the Movement for Black Lives.

Ending police violence, Byrd says, will require a radical shift in policingnot a little bit, not reform, not body cams, not new training, she says, but rather a radical shift in the way we think about protecting our communities and public safety.

Its enraging that this is radical, Byrd adds. Me saying that taxpayer dollars should not fund those helicopters is radical.

Even though abolishing the police may be politically impossible right now, experts say the movement is laying the groundwork for a longterm shift in how best to keep people safe. No one is in a position to say tomorrow we flip a magic switch and there are no police, says Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing. But he points to other areas of society where consensus has developed that police are not the solution: in rich white communities, for example, when a teenager is caught with drugs, they are usually sent to rehab and not jail.

People are demanding that we have a bigger conversation about the kind of society that we have that requires so much policing and prisons, Vitale says. And trying to begin a conversation about what a world without that would look like.

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Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.

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Black Lives Matter Activists Want to End Police Violence. But They Disagree on How to Do It - TIME

Guides

Advocate for legislative bills, support Black-owned businesses, and other efforts you can make from home.

Image by LaylaBird via Getty

Night after night this week, Americans have masked up and met up in Boston and across the country to protest racial inequality and police violence, and to make the unequivocal statement that Black Lives Matter. But you dont need to physically stand next to the protestors to stand with them. Everybody can help build a more equitable society by committing themselves to better understanding historical contexts and Black experiences; listening to and amplifying Black voices; and recognizing ways to actively practice antiracism in your own life. In the words of Emerson College president Lee Pelton, This is not a black problem, but a structural issue built on white supremacy and centuries of racism.

Here are five ways to demonstrate support for the Black Lives Matter movementeven if youre not at a demonstration.

The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans at the hands of white police officers and vigilantes ignited this most recent round of protests, but flames of racial injustice have burned in our country for centuries. It will take action on every level of government to create meaningful change. Heres an online resource to help you find your representatives on the local, county, state, and federal levels. Send them emails and/or make phone calls asking them to support criminal justice reform, invest in community services like schools and public health facilities, and work toward equitability.

On the state level, you can ask your representative to support a bill currently being drafted by state Rep. Liz Miranda to limit police use of force, as well as three current bills sponsored by Boston Rep. Russell Holmes: Boston.com reports that members of the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus called on their colleagues this week to pass a bill which would set standards for the hiring, training, ethical conduct, and retention of law enforcement officers. Two other pieces of legislation would establish an office to review and reform the existing diversity plans of all state agencies, as well as commission a study on how institutional racism has fueled the criminal justice system in Massachusetts.

Defund.Email, meanwhile, uses Instagram to share suggested language to use to ask local representatives to defund law enforcement agencies. The web archive offers a one-click way to email Mayor Marty Walsh and the Boston City Council to demand they reduce the Boston Police Department budget and reinvest the money in local Black and Brown communities.

On the national level, Bostons own Rep. Ayanna Pressley has co-sponsored, along with Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a House resolution condemning police violence, racial profiling, and the use of excessive force. Has your representative added their voice to Pressleys call? Contact their office to ask your representative to speak out now about the need for the House to pass this resolution immediately.

Color Of Change is a national, online organization that aims to fight racial injustices around crime and policing, voting and democracy, economics and housing, media and culture, and beyond. Right now, it is spearheading a campaign seeking justice for the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by Louisville Metro Police in her own apartment during a misdirected, no-knock warrant search; among other causes such as asking Congress to protect Black-owned businesses during the COVID crisis. Check out its resources designed to help people respond effectively to injustices all around us.

And remember: To really hold officials accountable, you need to be registered to vote.

Now is a good time to think critically about how you use your platform on social media. Prioritize voices from Black leaders, artists, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, athletes, and other people you admire. Looking for some new namesand book titlesto add to your offline reading list? Boston has compiled plenty of recommendations chosen by Black local authors, and Boston Public Library has some ideas, as well. You should also check out The African American Literature Book Club, which is a treasure trove of resources. When it comes to understanding systemic inequalities and social movements, theres always room to go deeper.

This is a really tangible way to invest in the Black community in Boston. Here is Boston magazines list of local black-owned restaurants currently open for takeout, and here is the story behind the local Black Hospitality Coalition formed to financially help support them through the COVID crisis. The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts also works to advance the economic well-being of Black residents in the Bay State. On Instagram, @BlackOwnedBos shares information and links about local Black businesses, creatives, entrepreneurs, spaces, and resources; and Black Boston has a robust web directory of minority-owned companies, as well.

Here are places in Boston where you can donate to support either the ongoing movement to protest police brutality, or more broadly work to improve Black lives around Boston.

Not able to join in this weeks protests? Dont let that deter you: Fighting systemic racial inequality in America isnt a week-long effort. Its long-term work. Build up your networks and resources, commit to spending the time, and keep moving forward.

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Besides Protesting, Here Are Five Ways to Actively Support the Black Lives Matter Movement in Boston - Boston magazine