As this conference begins, more than 520 people will have been killed at the hand of police in the United States—and well over half of them will have been Black. From the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson to the killing of Eric Garner on Stanton Island; and from the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland to the killing of Freddie Grey in Baltimore, the epidemic of police murder of African Americans has become a source of struggle and a topic of heated conversation as both the scale of the problem as well as of the resistance has brought the issue to the attention of millions of people. “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “I can’t breathe,” have become ubiquitous slogans that drive home the enormity of the crimes being committed every day against Black people in the United States. This violence is not an aberration, but a key component of a systematic policy of racial oppression and disfranchisement dubbed by acclaimed author Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow.