“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important.” —Martin Luther King, Jr. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962

There will be no justice for Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed Chicago woman who was fatally shot by an off-duty cop in 2012.

Last month, in a dispatch for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, "The police are representatives of a state that derives its powers from the people." The gravity of Coates's words are not lost on me, and I have considered the sentence's trueness many times in the preceding weeks. "We, the people," our founding…

Yesterday, the Ferguson, Mo. police department announced that it would not release the name of the officer who shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Saturday. "The value of releasing the name is far outweighed by the risk of harm to the officer and his family," said Thomas Jackson, chief of the Ferguson…

Ersula Ore. Eric Garner. Jahmil-El Cuffee. Rosan Miller. Marlene Pinnock. Al Flowers. Alonzo Grant. This is just a sample of the men and women who have been savagely, and unnecessarily, beaten by police officers this summer. Garner’s case, in which an NYPD officer used a chokehold to restrain the 43-year-old Staten…