The police are not taking accountability for the violence that they enact in our communities, and yet there isn't as much outrage about that as there is about some broken windows and lost property.
Police violence is the tip of the iceberg when it relates to the conditions overall of black people across the globe.
There has to be a readjustment of resources that is being diverted to police and policing as opposed to community health services, and there certainly has to be control over the police by the communities that they are supposed to protect and serve.
If you're quiet, knowing that there's a culture of racism inside most police departments, and you're not saying anything, you are on the wrong side of history.
There have to be consequences for police who take the law into their own hands. There has to be a shift in the use-of-force policies that are used in departments across the country.
Although police terrorism plays a specific role on behalf of the state, it is not the totality of what state violence looks like or feels like in our communities.
Certainly, we have to make sure our police forces do not have weapons of mass destruction with which they can terrorize our communities.
I think that there are real concerns that we have around whose life is important and why. So if the official story is, for example, somebody was running from the police, does their life matter?
I hope we can figure out the reforms, educate and really retrain our police officers. Getting people to understand that just because I grew up a different way and my lifestyle's different, doesn't mean that you need to be afraid of me.
Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
