Killings in the black community, she explained, are due to a “total imbalance of power” for people growing up impoverished.

“They’re not funding schools,” Newsome said. “They’re not giving them any kind of opportunity, they don’t want to give them jobs, they don’t want to give them living wages, they don’t want to give them anything ... that will give the chance of having a life of any kind. So yes, there’s going to be violence.”

Violence tends to accompany poverty, she said, but instead of working to reduce crime by increasing economic opportunity and access to education, “what we do is create more prisons.” That, however, “makes things more dangerous for police and more dangerous to civilians as well,” she said.

“I frankly think it’s insulting (for) police to equate the way that police interact with civilians to the way civilians interact with each other, because if we can’t expect the police to conduct themselves with any more control, then as a civilian what is the function of police?” she concluded.

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Durham said at the forum that while fatal shootings involving police represent a small percentage of homicides nationally, highly publicized cases are being used wrongly as a condemnation of all officers.