see were part of six police shootings that came just within 24 hours of the verdict in the floyd killing. this is not some massive distracting attention grabbing issue constantly getting people s attention and certainly not getting the powerful people s attention or the corporations who influence so much policy in this country. no. the truth is, most of these incidents on that endless chart, they don t even make the national news in the first place. take another story within this past year. police went to the home of 32-year-old isaiah brown for domestic disturbance call. and then they killed him right by his own home. why? he was holding a cordless phone, they, the police, wrongly thought was a gun. and they demanded he drop the gun when he didn t have one. a warning, the video is disturbing. show me your hands now. show me your hands. drop the gun. he s got a gun to his head.
every point on it is a dead person and a family grieving. now, these tragedies, they play out across the entire country here, and sometimes we don t have a lot of details. other times, we do get some clue of what happened. we get these grim videos that tell an all too familiar story like wisconsin police shooting an unarmed man, jacob blake, in the back several times, paralyzing him for life. california police confronting unarmed man over alleged jaywalking. that s how the interaction began. we brought you this story earlier this year. they then shot him to death in broad daylight over a jaywalking stop. he was unarmed. or go back to george floyd s community where minnesota police killed another unarmed father, dante wright. there was some video of that. or police shooting andrew brown death as he tried to drive away from police. the video showed him fleeing, not attacking. just those last two videos you
consistent discrimination continues, and it shows a system that does not work, to use the term you just heard in some of those clips, doesn t work for everyone. because people brutalize and killed by police rarely get justice. that brings us to tonight s special report and it s about facts, not opinion or ideology. the protests were largely against police brutality and force. and we have now, tonight for you, the latest data on the use of force since then. since those protests last year. police are shooting and killing americans at roughly the same rate this year as last year on pace for the same aggregate total of police killing about a thousand people per year. you can see the number, this year, 2021, basically matching what people were protesting against, which was the rate of killing last year. this is from washington post data. now, this fact on your screen shows something that everyone
they re covered or not, whether the system notices or not. and while the last year did provide some scrutiny and progress and change, any person or corporation that claimed to care then should logically care now because the numbers haven t budged. the killing rate is just as bad now as it was when people were posting passionately after the murder of george floyd. this is the same america with the same rate of police shootings and killings. these are real lives. these are black lives lost, and while the rare conviction of that officer for murder was significant that people saw him let off in cuffs to serve time, that rare conviction is not the goal of this blm movement according to many of its leaders. it s also not the goal of a functioning justice system. now, why do i say that? again, listen to the civil rights leaders. they ve been telling us the goal is not to send more people to