By Debra Sweet

One may think that police murder of unarmed civilians, particularly people of color, in the U.S. has no connection to the wars perpetrated by the U.S. government across the globe, but there are striking parallels.

When police killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, grand juries did not deliver justice; no police were prosecuted. Black and Latinos, particularly young men, continue to be criminalized, targeted, and outright murdered with impunity, while the U.S. claims to be number one in human rights! The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA torture at the end 2014 revealed sickening details of the brutality and torture that many detainees, including those held at Guantanamo, have endured.

These crimes too have been sanctioned by officials at the highest level. None of them have been held to account. The U.S. government has killed thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia through its drone warfare program, all without any legal – let alone moral -- foundation. A drone operator who sees a group of people on his screen moving together and presumes they are terrorists is not at all unlike a police officer who sees a group of youth and presumes they're criminals.

All of these horrors are committed in the name of our "security and safety," whether it is the targeting of people of color in the U.S. or the targeting of people across the globe.

What we allow our government to do in this country, we allow it to do to others around the world. American lives are not more important than any others. Black and Brown lives matter just as much as white. We stand with those in the righteous struggle to end police brutality and murder here because the system that brutalizes, tortures, and oppresses people around the globe is the same system that brutalizes, tortures, and oppresses Black and Latino people in its own streets.

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