What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake?
The outrageous shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha shows the difference between elected officials’ kind words and actual progress. The movement against police violence will be fighting for a long time.
Men walk toward law enforcement with their hands up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the shooting of Jacob Blake on August 23. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
On Sunday afternoon in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake was shot eight times after being followed to his vehicle by two police officers.
According to a statement from his family, Blake was “helping to deescalate a domestic incident when police drew their weapons and tasered him. As he was walking away to check on his children, police fired their weapons several times into his back at point-blank range. Blake’s three sons were only a few feet away and witnessed police shoot their father.”
Immediately following the shooting, protestors gathered in the city’s streets. By nightfall, the court house was on fire. On Monday, the National Guard arrived, though that didn’t stop protestors from burning down the Department of Corrections. The scene in the hundred-thousand-person town is quickly coming to resemble the mass protests and riots that erupted in Minneapolis and spread across the country earlier this summer following the police killing of another black man, George Floyd.
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