Sick of Police Shootings? America Asked for Them

You could begin yesterday by watching video of a black man in Louisiana killed by police as he lay on the ground. You could end it by watching another black man, this time shot by police in Minnesota, slowly bleed to death in a car as a seven-year-old girl looked on from the back seat, while the man's girlfriend prayed to God not to take him.

This is the way things are because we – the privileged, safe, and secure public – asked for it. The only difference now is that we can no longer turn a corner on the internet without seeing live footage of what we've chosen.

In Baton Rouge, police responded Tuesday to a 911 call about a black man with a gun threatening people outside a convenience store, and found 37-year-old Alton Sterling. Store owner Abdullah Muflahi later denied that Sterling was harassing people, telling a CNN interviewer that Sterling was confused by the police response and that the situation could have been de-escalated if the police had explained why they were there.

Instead, police appear to have tasered Sterling before wrestling him to the ground. According to a video first posted by the Daily Beast, once down, one officer shouted, "He's got a gun!" One officer shot him twice in the chest; then, after a pause, an officer shot him several more times. "Fuck!" one shouted, followed by Sterling lifting a trembling hand up to his head before dying. His hands were empty. You can watch him die on YouTube.

Then, as if the day’s looping video of Sterling's 15-year-old son hiding his face in his shirt before burying it in the chest of a loved one and wailing "daddy!" wasn't enough, the evening brought the live stream of a 32-year-old public-school employee named Philando Castile bleeding out in a car, his girlfriend interrupting her appeals to God to challenge the actions of the officer she claimed put four bullets in Castile. Having witnessed the (then) near-death of the person nearest to her, she astonishingly turned her phone on and refused to let the person still aiming a gun at her boyfriend recede into anonymity, some disembodied avatar of police work.

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