Even for a radical magazine in a radical decade with Molotov cocktails on its mind, the cover of the July 1969 issue of Ramparts was, shall we say, arresting. Breaking the fourth wall in a big way, it cried Halt! with a helmeted, face-shadowed policeman pointing a revolver square at the reader’s head, and offered the following bounty: “$10,000 for Information Leading to the Arrest and Conviction of any Cop who has Murdered a Black Man.” Many of Ramparts’ insurrectionist covers have dated into countercultural relics. Not this one. Here we are, 46 years later, deep in the second term of the country’s first African-American president, and, for all of the country’s racial progress, the killings of black men (and boys) by police officers haven’t dwindled into a few grievous, rogue-cop incidents; they’ve appeared to accelerate and hemorrhage into a Rorschach blot of blood pools. Were any magazine to tout a similar wanted poster today the inundation would immobilize its in-box. Ramparts felt compelled to step up to the plate with its graphic proposal because, back in those analog days of Mad Men yore, documentation of police brutality was sketchy, sporadic, heavily dependent on eyewitness accounts. Digital technology has democratized eyewitnesshood, made it less subject to the Rashomon effect. All it takes to record law officers in the act of firing on an unarmed suspect or executing a beatdown is a bystander with a cell-phone camera or a surveillance cam in just the right spot. Yet the vortex impact of viral footage of killer cops—the outrage, protest marches, criminal charges—doesn’t seem to have inhibited lethal-forcers. Each week a new victim seems to go up on the scoreboard.

Black Lives Matter was the protest message adopted after the acquittal in 2013 of George Zimmerman in the shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. It swelled into a movement as open season seemed to be declared on black males and tragedies multiplied. Black lives matter in America, but white lives rule. Self-styled, homegrown, beef-jerky Red Dawn “Wolverines!” Open Carry showboats can preen about with AR-15s strapped to their backs without meeting kingdom come, and a psycho-killer such as James Eagan Holmes can be apprehended in one piece after conducting a massacre in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater that left 12 dead and 70 wounded, while a black father of four, Rumain Brisbon, can be shot for holding a vial of pills mistaken for a weapon, another can be shot for handling a pellet gun at Walmart (John Crawford, aged 22), and a 12-year-old black child can have his future erased for playing with a BB gun, shot by an officer who may not have been aware the boy was holding a toy gun. (The victim, Tamir Rice, died the next day at the hospital and six months after his death had still not been buried, denied even that dignity. His family finally decided to have him cremated.)

The latitude of response allowable to a black suspect is razor-thin to nonexistent. Resist, like Eric Garner, surrounded by a scrum of cops for the quality-of-life offense of allegedly selling individual cigarettes, or “loosies,” and you can find yourself in a choke hold that leaves you gasping, “I can’t breathe,” until the last breath goes. Flee and you may get shot in the back, like Walter Scott, felled by a South Carolina officer whose fairy-tale account of the incident collapsed when video showed him performing his fatal marksmanship, or like Eric Harris, who uttered, as he lay dying from a gunshot wound, “My God, I’m losing my breath,” to which one of Tulsa County’s finest responded, “Fuck your breath.” Or you may get tossed into a van and reduced to a bag of broken body parts, like Freddie Gray, whose death ignited a raging tempest in Baltimore. Seemingly surrender and you can still get killed point-blank, as happened to Jerame Reid, who emerged from the passenger side of a car at a traffic stop in New Jersey with his hands raised. Six shots later, he was history.

It’s no great revelation that racism is rife in many police departments, even those in a city renowned for its liberal cosmopolitanism such as San Francisco, where a toxic spill of text messages between policemen (the most flagrant offender shared this handy health tip: “Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!”) led to officer dismissals and the review of thousands of cases. Such slur-slinging is sometimes defended as a combination of gallows humor and fraternal hazing, a Friars Roast on squad-car wheels that expresses camaraderie and releases job pressure, but the torture claims of nearly 200 black men at the hands of a white police commander and detectives in Chicago over the course of decades show that racial slurs emerge from embedded supremacist attitudes.