Six Police Officers Beat Unarmed Black Man in North Carolina

A video showing half a dozen of North Carolina police officers punching, kicking and beating with batons a Black man has been widely shared on social media drawing massive backlash on social media as he was unarmed, on the ground and had already been neutralized, but the police officers kept using force.

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A cellphone video of the incident was posted on Facebook Friday and quickly reached thousands of people. The video shows police brutally beating an unarmed man who allegedly was resisting the police officers, at the intersection of Garner Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in southeast Raleigh, North Carolina.

Authorities have started an investigation after the video surfaced and after several human and civil rights activists denounced the police brutality. "They are trained law enforcement officers, we are not talking about a group of vigilante citizens with no training who are trying to subdue a situation," said Dawn Blagrove executive director of the Carolina Justice Policy Center and activist. 

The Raleigh Police Department has an ongoing investigation and has issued a statement. "In the spirit of transparency, we have proactively made the District Attorney's office aware of this situation. The Raleigh Police Department offers no further comment on this ongoing investigation," read the statement. 

"It really doesn't matter what happened leading up to it because the standards of care being deployed by our law enforcement shouldn't matter," said Blagrove. "Those standards should stay in place regardless of the situation."

This is the latest case of police violence in the U.S. as activists and rights organizations in the country have been for years denouncing and protesting against the killings of unarmed Back people which they argue is part of a systemic racism within police forces in the country. 

In a study published by Criminology & Public Policy in 2017, it was found that police officers were twice as likely to kill unarmed Black civilians as unarmed white civilians. The study examined the most robust dataset on police shootings available, compiled by the Washington Post in 2015.