It’s been a bad week in the United States: six nights of protests, huge anger, rioting and looting in 50 cities, hundreds arrested or injured — but only six dead over the police murder of George Floyd. The number may have gone up by the time you read this, but it’s definitely not 1968 again.
In the last sustained series of riots about police violence against African-Americans, it was very different: 34 dead in the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, 26 dead in Newark in 1967, 43 killed in the Detroit uprising later the same summer. And 46 dead after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, although police violence was not the immediate cause that time.
Does the much lower death toll in 2020 mean that things have got (slightly) better in the intervening half-century? Or does it just mean that wearing bodycams is making the police more cautious about using extreme violence? Either way, race relations in the U.S. are still worse than almost anywhere else.
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