The rallying cry of Black Lives Matter is gaining an increasingly Canadian accent. Both responses, All Lives Matter and “at least blacks in Canada have it better than blacks in the U.S.,” dehumanize and help to justify the molestation, maiming and murder of black bodies by police. The Special Investigations Unit was in large part created to close the police accountability gap that existed and still persists when a black person is killed by an officer. What needs to be understood is that by defensively diminishing black Canadian experiences of police violence by arguing that it is worse in the States, that person is repeating the same violence as those who use the retort, All Lives Matter. For instance, in Toronto, since at least 1978 no police officer has ever served time in prison for killing a black person, despite the fact that black people are extraordinarily overrepresented in instances of police use of lethal force.

Source: thestar July 25, 2016 09:56 UTC