Smartphone footage of police brutality highlights a dire need to tell more humane stories about Black victims, Allissa Richardson says in The Atlantic.
“Widening the news coverage beyond the videos also would help undo centuries of biased reporting, which has typically cast Black people as aggressors and the police as wranglers of the unruly,” she writes. “A central piece of Blake’s narrative, for instance, has to do with the environment in which he lived, because none of these incidents of police brutality occurs in a vacuum.”