Description: Black people in the United States have always referred to policing as a force of terror. Despite generations of scholarship, activism, and everyday partitioning to address the results of this terror, academic disciplines, policy makers and mainstream media refuse to suggest that the United States has committed State Violence against Black People. Citing Weberian ideals about the state’s monopoly on legitimized violence and coupling it with a criminalization and dehumanization of Black people that became the bases of the wealth of the American Colonial Empire, Black people have never been seen as potential victims of state terrorism.

Even most recently, when the term Police Terrorism was popularized through protests against police killings of Unarmed Black people in the “Post Racial” - Social Media era, beginning with Oscar Grant - the term has been almost exclusively used to refer to Black Death at the hands of police. While these killings can be considered instrumental violence of State Terrorism, our hyper focus on these individual incidents has skewed our understanding of and relegated the non-fatal collective terror experienced by Targeted Black Communities at the hands of police and its nexus, to the margins of our analyses and attention.

The Conceptual Framework of Systemic Police Terrorism shifts that understanding by:

• Situating Systemic Police Terrorism within State Terrorism

• Focusing on Collective Non-Fatal impacts on Targeted Black Communities

The framework uses qualitative and quantitative data to provide new ways to research this phenomenon and identify more effective ways for Black people to pursue alternatives to Public Safety that focus on healing and protecting our communities without depending on police reform efforts.