While the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Missouri have made police treatment of black suspects an issue of national controversy, the increasing ubiquity of smartphones has made police-citizen interactions easier to record. The result, in recent months, has been a seemingly nonstop series of upsetting police-violence videos gone viral. Above, a compilation of recorded incidents of police violence against unarmed suspects—none of whom were armed or engaged in the commission of a violent crime—in the United States in 2014.
Correction, October 20, 2014: The video above originally referred to the St. Louis Sheriff’s Department rather than the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department. The video has also been updated to say that John Crawford was carrying an air rifle when he was shot.
