Death in black and white
The shooting deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota at the hands of police last week, captured on social media, followed by the killing of five Dallas officers by a retaliating sniper, shocked the nation and left many Americans feeling like the country is unraveling. Police supporters and critics of the Black Lives Matter movement complain that citizen protests and inflammatory rhetoric are inciting violence against law enforcement. Movement supporters and protestors seeking reforms say that unpunished police violence against black people is fanning community anger. Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is a legal theorist in areas including criminal law, criminal procedure, and race theory, and serves as faculty director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. In a Q&A session, Sullivan spoke with the Gazette about the shootings and the longstanding tensions between police and African-Americans. GAZETTE: We’ve had these horrific incidents of violence in Louisiana, Minnesota,...