George Floyd’s murder, the ensuing mass protests, the renewed calls for police reform and the trial of the former police officer convicted of his murder overshadow a staggering reality: The pace of fatal encounters with police, who have killed about three people per day this year, is on par with last year’s daily average. Through the first four months of the year, there have been just six days in which police across the United States did not kill anyone. It’s a bracing reminder of how little has changed despite a pandemic and intense scrutiny of policing practices in the 12 months since the world witnessed the Floyd killing in Minneapolis. “There’s an effort, at least by some political actors, to give folks false hope that we’re turning the corner around police violence,” said Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice and democracy campaigns at the racial justice group Color of Change. “These numbers show that, as far as we can tell, it’ll continue.” Black people like teenager Ma’Khia Bryant, 20-year-old Daunte Wright and 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr. have all suffered the same fate as Floyd — and so many others before them — in recent weeks: death by police. They are among 89 Black people who have been killed by police this year through May 21, according to Mapping Police Violence. Another teen, Adam Toledo, who was Latino, was shot and killed by police in Chicago in March.
In a nation in which Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people — and 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed when killed by police — the statistics are damning. Criminal justice experts lament that policing culture is predicated on violence, with militarized police forces, overcriminalization of low-level offenses and an us-versus-them mentality inside police forces. “Research tells me they’re not recruiting the right people for the job and they’re not training them for the job,” La Vigne said. “They’re training them to take a warrior approach rather than a guardian approach. They’re trained in a militaristic style. They’re trained on use of force, with a use-of-force continuum that gets in their head that you start with this amount of force and then you increase it to that amount and then a higher threshold and a higher threshold versus being trained in de-escalation, which is really pre-escalation.” Prosecutors have also been a focus of activist groups like Color of Change in recent years. The Cato Institute’s Neily suggested conflicts of interest between prosecutors and police officers could factor into why so few officers are criminally charged and convicted for killing people.
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and 
. Yes cops are totally blameless, or so the narrative goes.