She was SEVEN YEARS OLD. She was asleep on her grandmother’s couch when a police officer fired the shot that k!lled her. May 16, 2010. Detroit, Michigan. Aiyana Stanley-Jones was sleeping under a blanket at her grandmother’s home when Detroit police carried out a midnight raid. Officers were searching for a murder suspect who was believed to be upstairs in the house. Aiyana was downstairs. She was not the person they were looking for. She was not involved in the investigation. She was a little girl who should have been safe in her own home. But during the raid, Officer Joseph Weekley fired his weapon, striking Aiyana in the head. She died at just seven years old. And there was something else that made this tragedy even more disturbing: a reality television crew was there filming the police operation for A&E’s The First 48. The raid was being recorded for a television audience. A child was killed in the process. Aiyana’s death devastated her family and sparked outrage over police conduct, the use of force during raids, and the treatment of Black children in their own homes. The legal proceedings dragged on for years. Weekley faced charges in connection with her death, but two trials ended without a conviction. Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges in 2015. No conviction followed the killing of a seven-year-old girl who had been sleeping when the raid began. Think about that for a moment. A child went to sleep in her grandmother’s home. She never got the chance to wake up, eat breakfast, play with her friends, or grow into the person she might have become. Her family was left with a loss that no court proceeding could undo. Aiyana Stanley-Jones was seven. She deserved to grow up. She deserved to feel safe at home. And her life deserved more than becoming another name in a long record of tragedies involving police violence. Her name was Aiyana Stanley-Jones. She was a child. And she should still be here.

He was lying flat on his back in the road with both hands in the air, shouting that he was a therapist and the man beside him was autistic and holding a toy truck. A policeman shot Charles Kinsey anyway. Kinsey asked him why. The officer said: "I don't know." North Miami, Florida, 18 July 2016. Kinsey, 47, was a behavioural therapist. One of his patients, Arnaldo Rios Soto, a 26-year-old autistic man, had wandered out of a group home and was sitting in the middle of the road playing with a silver toy truck. Someone called 911 and reported a man with a gun threatening to kill himself. Kinsey did everything. He lay down in the road on his back. He put both hands straight up in the air where they could be seen. He shouted his identification, his job, his patient's condition, and that the object was a toy. It is on video. A SWAT officer fired three rounds. One hit Kinsey in the leg. Then he was rolled over and handcuffed, bleeding in the road, and left there for a reported twenty minutes before an ambulance got to him. He asked the officer why he had shot him. He has testified that the answer was: *I don't know.* The officer, Jonathan Aledda, said he had been trying to protect Kinsey and believed Rios Soto was armed and a threat. He was charged — which is itself unusual — and tried twice. The first trial produced a conviction on one count of culpable negligence. A judge threw it out. A second jury acquitted him in 2019. Nobody has been held responsible. Kinsey survived and gave interviews, and the sentence he keeps returning to is the one everybody should take from this. He was unarmed, flat on his back, hands up, announcing himself, in daylight, on camera. He did everything right, and it did not matter. Every Black parent in America who has ever recited the rules to a teenager — hands visible, say sir, do not move, announce what you are doing — has had to reckon with Charles Kinsey, because he followed all of them, perfectly, out loud, and was shot anyway.