The respective Philando Castile and Mel Gibson incidents I referenced are not “anecdotes”-each is settled historical fact. And the patterns are repeated across the country.

The police habitually use significantly greater force against African-American people than against white people in equivalent situations-and, in many cases, use deadly force against African-Americans when, in equivalent sitautions, they don’t use force at all against whites..

If a white kid was playing with a gun, the police would never just roll straight up and waste the kid without asking questions-as they did to 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

If a white man was committing the crime of selling cigarettes on the street without collecting cigarette taxes, which is all that Eric Garner was doing on that street in New York that day, the cops would let it go at fining him and telling him to show up in court.

If a white woman was guilty of a harmless illegal lane change, the cops would either give her a warning or politely write her a ticket-no cop would ever arrest a white woman for that and throw her into a jail cell while preventing her from calling a lawyer or her friends or anyone at the business where she was starting a new job that day after months of unemployment, throwing that woman into a panic and driving her to suicide out of fear and despair, as was done to Sandra Bland.

It’s all fact and it’s a documented patter.

And there’s no good reason for the pattern to be continued.

Police should be trained to enter any situation with the intent to de-escalate-that bringing the situation to an end without anyone being injured or killed is far more important than “asserting your authority”.

Police should never be taught to go into a “DefCon 1” mode in which they refuse to listen to any bystander trying to communicate about the situation they’ve intervened in.

Police should be trained to make no assumptions about people of color different than the assumptions they would make about white people.