“No worries.” Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.

The steady advance of technology and the ubiquity of cellphones mean that more police violence is now caught on camera than ever before. If you so choose, you can go online and watch hours of footage of police officers killing black men, women and children all over the country. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought further national attention to state violence that goes unfilmed. Diamond Reynolds had most likely heard of Jamar Clark, an unarmed 24-year-old black man who was shot in nearby Minneapolis last year. Any or all of the names Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald might have been familiar to her. These deaths all share similarities, and those similarities provide a lesson for Americans living in policed and occupied communities: Black people are approached as though inherently violent, and so any interaction with a police officer can end violently. A black person’s rights, even inalienable ones, can be stripped from them without due process. And, almost always, an officer who does so won’t be convicted of any wrongdoing.

And every incident, no matter how isolated, that takes the life of an officer — when Micah Johnson fires on Dallas police as they watch over a peaceful protest, when Ismaaiyl Brinsley bused in to New York to ambush police officers in their cruiser — brings with it the risk that all blacks will face the wrath of the state’s fear and retaliation, as officers scramble to “regain control” of the local population. This is seen as just, supported by the conceit that black citizens brought this upon themselves. The aggressive posture of the police, the fear that every man reaching for a wallet may be reaching for his weapon, only deepens. And everyone insisting on black citizens’ rights — to life, to due process, even to bear arms — is blamed for instigating violence against the police.

The night before Philando Castile was killed by the police in Minnesota, 37-year-old Alton Sterling was killed by the police in Baton Rouge, La. Two Baton Rouge officers, Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, responded to a 911 call that a man was brandishing a gun at Triple S Food Mart, a local convenience store. Sterling was out front selling CDs, as he had been for years. He had a gun in his pocket. (Louisiana is an open-carry state.) The officers told him to get to the ground, pushed him against a car, then tackled and Tasered him. As Sterling was pinned, one of the officers lifted his gun inches from Sterling’s chest and fired twice. The officer paused, then fired four more times. Sterling died in the parking lot.

There’s a specific cadence to cop killings. State violence is so ubiquitous and visible that citizens, experienced, can recognize its approach. The Triple S’s owner, Abdullah Muflahi, caught the killing on video with his cellphone, pressing record when he saw the officers tackle his friend Sterling to the ground. Someone else was present, too: a member of a local organization called Stop the Killing, founded by a 43-year-old black activist named Arthur Reed. That person arrived after monitoring a police scanner and following the dispatcher’s directions to the convenience store. After hearing the officers claim that Sterling had caused his own death by reaching for his gun, the group released its footage.

The heroism of Reynolds, Muflahi and Reed in the face of occupying forces are minuscule, pyrrhic triumphs in an ever-rising sea of blood. The footage of both killings will force investigations. We know what comes next. Both Castile and Sterling will be further dehumanized; their pasts will be pillaged, and attempts will be made to recast both victims as the gunmen, the aggressors who brought their deaths upon themselves. The officers will argue that both shootings were in keeping with their training — that, in effect, they accomplished their mission. The police officers may even get off. They normally do.

The day after the deaths of Sterling and Castile, people took to the streets, in cities across the country, to protest the hail of bullets coming from the police. Those in Dallas found themselves in a hail of bullets aimed at the police, in a sniper attack that claimed the lives of at least five officers and injured seven more. Two civilians were also wounded, including one black mother who was shot in the calf while shielding her children.