

Rayshard Brooks spent Friday with his 8-year-old daughter, CNN reports, celebrating her birthday before her party on Saturday by taking her to get her nails done and, later on, to an arcade. Brooks never made it to his daughter’s party, though, because an Atlanta police officer shot and killed him late Friday night in the parking lot of a Wendy’s while Brooks was trying to run away. He was 27.
Brooks’ death at the hands of Garrett Rolfe, whom the Atlanta PD has since fired, is yet another devastating example of the violence Black people face not just in the United States but from the United States, with cops acting as judge, jury, and executioner as they see fit. But this isn’t just a matter of rooting out the bad actors—the individual cops, judges, or corrections officers responsible for the deaths of Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd—it’s about uprooting the entire criminal justice system and building something new in its place. If you haven’t read abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba’s New York Times op-ed about the necessity of abolishing the police, rather than seeking reforms, please do so today.
Upset at the news coming out of his hometown, T.I. spoke out against Brooks’ killing at a Black Lives Matter protest in Atlanta on Saturday. He took particular issue with those who might try to justify Brooks’ extrajudicial execution on account of the fact that he may have been intoxicated at the time Rolfe killed him or that Brooks had reportedly grabbed an officer’s taser before he was shot.