The police in the United States treat people of color with violence routinely, even when those people are children. I recently interviewed a 14-year-old gay boy abused by a school cop. I did the interview after a coalition of parents at that school reached out to me to tell me their brown-skinned children get treated like shit at that school, especially by the sheriff's deputies who are permanently assigned there.

In this instance, the 14 year old boy had caught the abuse on audio. The school district put out a false press release indicating the audio had been edited so that it didn't produce a true account of events.

Local press, and even some national gay press repeated the press release uncritically.

I got a hold of the original audio, completely unedited, and noticed that the only thing altered was the deletion of 2 minutes of silence at the beginning. None of the contents had been changed, not in any way.

I was able to report that, because I bothered to talk to the kid of color at the center of the story. Nobody else in the press talked to him or his mother, not even after they reached out and asked to be interviewed.

Granted, this kid did not get killed, but he was abused by a lawless cop in much the same way the people of color are abused around the United States every day. Then I got a front row seat to have the system works its ass off to cover that up.

And when I say the system, I mean the sheriff's department, the school district, and the local press, hand in hand.