* In the article, “The Police Murder of Emeshyon Wilkins... And the Need for Revolution to End This Madness,” on revcom.us (April 20, 2026), it is said: “Over one hundred fifty years after the end of slavery in the U.S., Black people continue to be terrorized daily, with dozens murdered by police every year.” (italics added here)
This (dozens) may, technically, be the number who have been definitely established to be unarmed, and therefore undeniably murdered. But the number of Black people killed by police every year is in the hundreds. For example, one study indicates that Black people account for nearly 25 percent of killings by police (which would amount to about 300 in recent years). Mapping Police Violence, which systematically studies this phenomenon and is considered a major, reliable data base that tracks police violence, indicates that the number of Black people killed by police in recent years—including deaths not just by police gunfire but by other police actions as well—is actually around 500 a year.
Emeshyon Wilkins Murdered by St. Louis police
Again, “dozens” could refer to the number of killings by police of Black people who have been acknowledged—or clearly established—to be unarmed. But to simply say as we did that “dozens” are “murdered” each year, understates the magnitude of the outrage—including (but not only) because the number of actually “unarmed” is very likely to be greater than what is counted, since police routinely lie about people they kill being “armed,” and it is often not possible to definitively disprove this (e.g., when videos bringing out the truth do not exist or are successfully suppressed by the authorities). And, in any case, many killings by police are unjustified even if the person killed did possess a firearm (while, even on the slanted terms of the law as it exists, they did not pose an actual imminent threat to the police, or anyone else—and therefore the killing by police was unjustified.).
Consequently, stating things the way this is done in this article on revcom.us (on the police murder of Emeshyon Wilkins) leaves a very definitely understated impression.
In terms of how to formulate this, a better approach is to indicate the truth that hundreds of Black people are killed by police every year, with many of them clearly established to be unarmed. Another important expression of this is the reality that — as Bob Avakian has pointed out repeatedly — the number of Black people killed by police since 1960 is greater than the thousands who were lynched during the time of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror.1