teleSUR English | 7/9/2016
Even as the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling continue to stir outrage over lethal police brutality and systemic racism, the death of five Latinos this week garnered little media fanfare.
Fermin Vincent Valenzuela, Vinson Ramos, Melissa Ventura, Anthony Nuñez, Pedro Villanueva and Raul Saavedra-Vargas were shot and killed by cops since Sunday, but only local media picked up the story.
“We’re being targeted,” Gloria Hernandez, an organizer against police brutality in Fresno, told teleSUR.
She has been compiling her own database of police killings in Fresno — she began with the San Joaquin Valley but the list got unwieldy — and has counted that from 2000 to 2014, over 80 percent of victims were Latino. One of the police officers killed five people without an indictment; many killed up to four. Hernandez said that she couldn’t rely on media reports or support from nonprofits like the ACLU, so she went straight to the police for her numbers.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 