The incident is the latest in an onslaught of cases of police aggression against African-American citizens, often youth, across the country. In fact, roughly 100 miles southeast in Charleston, Officer Michael Slager awaits trial in the murder of Walter Scott, the unarmed Black man Slager shot in the back following a traffic stop April 4.
One hundred-seventy miles north, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, experts gathered Wednesday for a panel convened to address the issue of criminal justice reform in the 21st century.
Noting the highest-in-the-world incarceration vs. population ratio in the U.S., antiquated laws and seemingly excessive punishments, the panelists said the United States as a nation must find a way to curb the problems in police-community relations and lower the overall incarceration rate, but also change the attitudes of those in authority toward those they are to serve.
“We’re still under 1980s assumptions about our society,” said former U.S Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina Walter Holton, who added that these assumptions most negatively “affect African-American young men.”
“We need to change the whole view of the world in the U.S. that [says] we need to be locking people up,” said Wake Forest University School of Law professor Mark Rabil. “You might think that we don’t have slavery in this country anymore … but if you look at the 13th Amendment, slavery was never really abolished.”
Rabil continued, saying that the present-day system of mass incarceration perpetuates a cycle of modern-day slavery.
