It is time for police reform nationwide!

Two Black fathers have been shot dead for nothing. Keith Lamont Scott of Charlotte, North Carolina, had been waiting in his car for his son to arrive home from school, and Terence Crutcher, of Tulsa, Oklahoma had been waiting at the side of the road after his truck stalled. Both men are now dead, wrongfully gunned down by police. Both are Black men.

Families should never have to fear that our loved ones could come to harm at the hands of those charged with protecting them.

Keith Lamont Scott and Terence Crutcher join a long and unending line of African American and Latino youth and community members killed by police, including:

-- Philando Castile of Falcon Heights, Minnesota, who was shot and killed by police during a minor traffic stop because of a broken taillight.
-- Alton Sterling, who was selling CDs when police tackled him to the ground and shot several times at close range.
-- Eric Garner, husband and father, who was choked to death in New York.
-- John Crawford, who was shot to death when he picked up a toy gun that was for sale in an Ohio Walmart.
-- Seventeen-year-old unarmed Jesús Huerta was shot to death while handcuffed in the back of a police car.
-- Eighteen-year-old unarmed Ramarley Graham who was shot to death in Bronx, NY
-- Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman who was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas.

The horror of losing family members to senseless, racially motivated police violence is a daily threat in the lives of Black and brown people in America. Studies show that, even though White Americans outnumber Black Americans fivefold, Black people are three times more likely than White people to be killed when they encounter the police in the US, [1] and Black teenagers are far likelier to be killed by police than White teenagers. [2]

Law enforcement currently kills Black Americans at nearly the same rate as Jim-Crow-era lynchings. [3]

Mothers, fathers, and other family members demand change that protects our young people from reckless policing. Families across America urge the federal government to take definitive and immediate action, including but not limited to the following reforms:

• A fully-resourced and rigorous civil rights and criminal investigation by the DOJ into discriminatory policing, excessive force, and death or injury by police in every state in the country;
• A comprehensive, streamlined, public national-level database of police shootings; excessive force, misconduct complaints, traffic and pedestrian stops, and arrests, broken down by race and other demographic data, with key privacy protections, the exclusion of personally identifying factors and information, and deportation immunity for civilians;
• Mandating of Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST) in every state and inter-state coordination between all POSTs;
• An executive order that creates a strong and enforceable prohibition on police brutality and discriminatory policing based on race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, and housing status;
• Increased funding for the DOJ's Office for Civil Rights to ensure additional, accessible state-level responders for police and other civil rights violations Divestment of federal anti-drug grants and federal funding for police departments that demonstrate abuse of power and massive reinvestment in community controlled and based policing practices;
• Support for the passage of the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA);
• Streamlined national use of force matrix and mandating that state and local police have clear and streamlined matrices; and
• Strict limits on asset seizure without due process and the transfer of any military equipment to local law enforcement under the 1033 program, guidelines that ensure that the equipment is not used on non-violent protesters, and an end to the requirement that such military weaponry is used within a year.

[1] Mike Brown’s shooting and Jim Crow lynchings have too much in common. It’s time for America to own up, The Guardian, August 25, 2014.
[2] “What we know about who police kill in America,” VOX, Oct. 16, 2014.
[3] Mike Brown’s shooting and Jim Crow lynchings have too much in common. It’s time for America to own up, The Guardian, August 25, 2014.