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A woman joins others gathered at the scene of a police involved shooting on Wednesday, July 6, 2016 in Falcon Heights, Minn. St. Anthony Police interim police chief Jon Mangseth said the incident began when an officer pulled over a vehicle Wednesday in the St. Paul suburb. Mangseth said he did not have details about the reason for the traffic stop, but that at some point shots were fired. The man was struck but no one else was injured, he said. Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP
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Two days, two shootings, two dead black men

This time, it was live-streamed on Facebook

Clinton Yates @clintonyates
Topics:
All Day Black Lives Matter Alton Sterling Philando Castile Police Misconduct

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    8:00 AMPhilando Castile is his name. He was 32 years old.

    You can add it to the list of black people in the past [insert whatever number you want] years that have been killed by the police for one reason or another, during what are supposed to be routine interactions. This time, however, the aftermath was streamed live on Facebook.

    WARNING: This video contains graphic content and may be upsetting to some viewers

    This is what social networking is these days: a woman videotaping her boyfriend getting killed in the driver’s seat of a car by a police officer, after being stopped for a broken taillight, while her 4-year-old daughter looks on from the backseat.

    As of early Thursday morning, no one knew where to find the woman who captured the video from the passenger’s seat.

    She was later found, and identified herself as Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, before speaking on the situation.

    “I did it [took the video] so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect and serve us,” Reynolds said. “They are here to assassinate us. They are here to kill us because we are black …”

    Screen Shot 2016-07-07 at 7.45.42 AM

    “Minnesota court records show only misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors on Philando Castile’s record,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune‘s story reads, as if that has ever mattered. Castile worked as a cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori school. After he was killed Wednesday night, hundreds gathered outside Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton’s mansion residence in St. Paul, where they remained overnight in protest.

    It was just the night before, on Tuesday, when the people of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been tasked with shouldering the burden of the death of Alton Sterling, who was killed in a parking lot after an altercation with police that left him on his back, dying on the asphalt. His son, understandably, couldn’t handle it.

    It’s only Thursday.

    Here’s Minneapolis NAACP president Nekima Levy-Pounds discussing the matter on the scene.

    Less than a day ago, a woman named Nakia Jones offered a powerful soliloquy on Facebook about what it’s like to be black and be a police officer who joined the force to do the right thing. It should be noted that she’s from and works in Cleveland, where we’ve seen multiple cases of outrageous police shootings in the past five years. It’s a harrowing look at how the job affects actual humans every day.

    It will not be obsolete anytime soon.

    Clinton Yates is a tastemaker at Andscape. He likes rap, rock, reggae, R&B and remixes — in that order.