Your article did an excellent job of articulating this issue. I have debated a few people on this topic and it is a sensitive one. Today, they posted a picture of a 3 year old baby and wrote on his picture that there were no protests, no outrage, and that no one cared when we do it to one another. This assertion was ridiculous. However, a few people did not agree with my assessment that black on black crime is a racist trope used to diminish the momentum to decrease police presence in black communities.

These police and conservatives use broken window policing and use the poverty of a community to determine the force necessary for those living in the community. The wealth gap in America is huge and the virus has exasperated this. Being poor should not be a crime. Being black should not be a crime. I have been disappointed many times by people who have made this argument.

“Broken windows policing is at the root of a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involves more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence” (Vitale, 2018)

Vitale, A. S. (2018). The end of policing. London, UK: Verso.