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After Massasoit's death in 1661, his eldest son Wamsutta, later named Alexander, succeeded him. In 1662, the English arrested Alexander on suspicion of plotting war. During questioning, he died, and Metacom—now known as Philip, as many Wampanoags took English names—came to power.

A jury made up of colonists and Indians found three Wampanoag men guilty for Sassamon’s murder and hanged them on June 8, 1675. Their execution incensed Philip, whom the English had accused of plotting Sassamon’s murder, and ignited tensions between the Wampanoag and the colonists, setting the stage for war.

Between June 20 and June 23, 1675, the Wampanoag carried out a series of raids against the Swansea colony of Massachusetts, killing many colonists and pillaging and destroying property. English officials responded by sending their military to destroy Philip’s home village of Mount Hope, Rhode Island.

A week later, around 700 Nipmuc Indians ambushed a militia group escorting a wagon train of colonists. Almost all colonists and militia were killed in the fighting, known as the Battle of Bloody Brook.

Hoping to prevent a spring Indian onslaught, Plymouth Colony’s Governor Josiah Winslow gathered the colonial militia and attacked a massive Narragansett and Wampanoag fortification near the Great Swamp in West Kingston, Rhode Island, on December 19, 1675.

under the leadership of Chief Canonchet. After the Great Swamp Fight, King Philip set up camp in New York, possibly to enlist the Mohawk’s assistance. But the Mohawk attacked the Wampanoag and forced them to retreat to New England, with the Mohawk in hot pursuit.

In an attack known as the “Nine Men's Misery" incident, Narragansett Indians ambushed around 60 colonists and 20 Christian Wampanoag Indians. The Indians killed almost all the colonists; however, nine men were captured and gruesomely tortured to death.

Throughout the spring of 1676, the tide began to turn for the English. In April, Chief Canonchet was captured, handed over to the Mohegans and shot, beheaded and quartered, leaving the Narragansett without a leader. In May, the militia attacked and killed up to 200 Narragansett at the Battle of Turner Falls at Peskeompscut near the Connecticut River.

The English-Indian soldier John Alderman shot and killed King Philip on August 20, 1676, at Mount Hope. King Philip was hung, beheaded, drawn and quartered. His head was placed on a spike and displayed at Plymouth colony for two decades.

Thousands of Indians were killed, wounded or captured and sold into slavery or indentured servitude. The war decimated the Narragansett, Wampanoag and many smaller tribes and mostly ended Indian resistance in southern New England, paving the way for additional English settlements.

He responded simply by insisting that the strike against Anwar Al-Awlaki, one of two American citizens killed by drones in 2009, was justified because he was a "legitimate military target"

no United States citizen may arbitrarily deprived of life, liberty or property by the Government without sanction of law

redefinitions of what counts as a "casualty"

"counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants" unless there is explicit evidence, posthumously proving them innocent.

Administration's assertion that the 9/11 attacks constituted a "declaration of war" by al-Qaeda against the United States and hence gives the latter the power to pursue the group regardless of which country's borders it may be located in. This is precisely the argument used by the Obama Administration to justify its attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, even though it has not officially declared war against the country. Its consequences are a legal limbo, where the victims of the attacks cannot avail either the international law of war under the Geneva Conventions or being non-citizens also cannot bring claims under US law.

he United Nation's move is replete with good intentions, and on the international legal front, any response to US overreach on drones even if it is a belated one, is welcome indeed.

n addition, absent on both the international front and in the domestic debate on drones inside the United States is a discussion of the moral challenges imposed by using lethal killing technology where the killers are never themselves in danger and the targets have little notice of the extent of the surveillance they may be facing or the probability of an attack.

then Afghanistan and now Pakistan are ravaged and hundreds of thousands of people killed in the name of eliminating terror.

A sulfur plant set on fire by the Islamic State has sent dozens of people for treatment for respiratory problems, and several journalists have been hurt, and two killed, covering the fighting.

Although the government’s military operation itself is largely meeting its goals in progressing toward the city, the turmoil surrounding it is a sign of just how difficult it would be to secure a lasting peace across Iraq’s many divisions even after a victory.

The human toll and factional distrust are early examples of the complex humanitarian crisis

killed close to 200 people, including civilians and children, in and around Mosul in the past week.

Among them were said to have been 50 former Iraqi policemen

Mr. Colville said that in one case, several women and children, including a 4-year-old, who were being held as human shields by Islamic State fighters were suddenly gunned down by the militants, possibly because they were lagging behind the group.

“ISIS has lost hundreds of its members from airstrikes when they withdraw, so now they are forcibly displacing the residents of villages they are leaving and using them as human shields,”

So far, about 9,000 people have fled the fighting as Kurdish and Iraqi government forces have moved to secure villages around the city, according to the United Nations.

as the United Nations has worked to protect civilians, it has at times been undermined by the Iraqi security forces.

On the military front, the Islamic State has managed to launch two attacks on cities far from Mosul, diverting the attention of Iraqi security forces and the warplanes of the American-led coalition.

Kurdish officials in Kirkuk responded by forcing out hundreds of Arab families who had sought safety there, according to United Nations officials and local residents, as they feared that terrorists had sneaked into the city posing as displaced civilians.

local authorities were exacting collective punishment on Arabs for the crimes of the Islamic State

Local officials blamed the American-led coalition, but United States military officials have said the episode was not the result of a coalition airstrike.

Some have suggested that an artillery shell hit the mosque, but Human Rights Watch said the evidence it had seen “is consistent with an airstrike.” The Iraqi forces are also conducting airstrikes, and Human Rights called for a thorough investigation.

Citing safety concerns, the Iraqi government said recently that it would begin restricting journalists’ access to the front lines

In a post on Sunday on Let Us Build Pakistan, a blog where Mr. Zaki was an editor, Ali Abbas Taj, the editor in chief, said that Mr. Zaki was killed because of his unwavering campaign against the Taliban and their Sunni extremist allies.

Human rights groups have strongly condemned the killing.

Mr. Butt said militant groups have started singling out activists who have been campaigning on social media against social injustice and religious intolerance.

The policeman has been arrested

One policeman opened fire, killing the vendor and wounding two passersby, it added.

"Security forces brought in two riot police vehicles and an armoured truck and the victim's family is here and pelting them with rocks,"

"Security forces are retreating and promising justice but the crowd is demanding police hand over the killer."

There were also riots in Ismailia and the southern city of Luxor after at least three people died in police custody in a single week in November.

A suicide bomber went in first to clear the way for gunmen.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, claiming to have inflicted heavy casualties at what Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, an insurgent spokesman, described as a “huge American base.”

At the height of the surge, from 2010 to 2012, an entire American brigade of roughly 4,500 soldiers was based at Pasab and at dozens of other small combat outposts in Zhare.

Only a few hundred American soldiers are still based in Zhare, and most are focused on advising Afghan forces, not fighting the Taliban.

Britain is not formally taking part in military action in Syria — its Parliament having rejected such an intervention two years ago — but Britain and France are involved in the American-led air campaign against Islamic State targets.

One student told television reporters he was in class when he heard gunshots: "We saw three terrorists shouting, 'God is great!' and rushing towards the stairs of our department.

Reports say a chemistry lecturer, named by media as Syed Hamid Husain, shot back at the gunmen to allow his students to flee, before he was killed.

"Then I saw a bullet hit him. I saw two militants were firing. I ran inside and then managed to flee by jumping over the back wall."

The victims - mostly male students - were shot in the head or chest. Seventeen people were injured. At least one security guard also died.

The attack is reminiscent of the December 2014 attack on a school in Peshawar in which more than 150 people, mostly schoolboys, were killed. But damage to life and property this time has been much less, mainly due to swift action by the local police, but also because of the fact that the university had its own team of more than 50 trained security guards on duty who first confronted the attackers.

A senior Taliban commander, Umar Mansoor, told the media the attack was in response to a military offensive against militant strongholds. He said four suicide attackers had carried out the attack.

There is a symbolic value attached to Bacha Khan University as it is named after a Pashtun nationalist leader who believed in non-violent struggle, says BBC Urdu's Asad Ali Chaudry.

In Damascus, at least four explosions were reported in Sayyida Zeinab, the location of Syria's holiest Shia Muslim shrine, said to contain the grave of the Prophet Muhammad's granddaughter.

The district was hit by suicide attacks last month that left 71 people dead and which IS fighters also said they had carried out.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group also said that at least 50 Islamic State fighters had been killed in an advance by government troops, backed by Russian air strikes, east of the northern city of Aleppo in the past 24 hours.'My duty'Meanwhile, Mr Kerry spoke optimistically about progress towards a possible ceasefire.

Asked by Spanish newspaper El Pais where he would see himself in 10 years' time, he said: "If Syria is safe and sound, and I'm the one who saved his country - that's my job now, that's my duty."Mr Assad also said his army was close to encircling rebel-held parts of Aleppo, and were advancing on Raqqa, the main stronghold of IS fighters.

killing more than 20 soldiers and tribesmen, the source added

At least 15 militants were subsequently killed in a gun battle, before Iraqi and US-led air strikes forced the rest of the attackers to retrea

killed another 15 soldiers and tribesmen, the source said

IS leader in charge of setting up car bombs had been killed along with four of his aides

600 and 1,000 IS militants in Ramadi.

strong defensive system in and around the city, including using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to create minefields

“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama said. “This is a matter of national security.”

“Seems to me that the greatest importance of this is to get the ball rolling so more people follow, and ideally the federal government,” Mr. Webster said. “I suspect more states will do this.”

own a gun.

Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

The National Rifle Association “does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have access to weapons,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the organization’s lobbying arm. “But this is a constitutional issue,” she said, adding that mere suspicion should not be enough to take away the righ

The no-fly list is a subset of the watch list.

Correction: December 10, 2015 An earlier version of this article, using information from state officials, erroneously attributed a distinction to the proposed measure in Connecticut. It would not be the first such law in the nation; at least one other state has such a ban.

“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican candidate for president, told CNN. “They wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon.”

Abe Mashal, a former Marine and a Muslim of mixed Palestinian-Italian background who lives in the Chicago area, was on the no-fly list until last year, for reasons he said were still a mystery to him.

“Never had any trouble with that,” he said of the gun purchase.

Since 2004, there have been 2,233 people who, like Mr. Mashal, landed on the government’s no-fly list because of terrorism suspicions and applied to buy a gun, according to a recent review of F.B.I. data by the Government Accountability Office.

But only rarely are legal reasons found to prohibit the sale, according to federal auditors. Since the F.B.I. began tracking the data, only 190 gun sales to people on the list — or 8.5 percent of all the attempted sales — have been blocked for other reasons, including mental illness or criminal convictions, auditors found.

But Democrats say increased fears of domestic terrorism stoked by the recent gun attacks in San Bernardino and in Paris are reason enough to stop people on a watch list from being able to buy a gun.

Mr. Malloy has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue. “I have previously written to Congress on this matter,” he said. “But inaction is not an option. So here in Connecticut, we are acting.

The federal government’s terrorism watch list is a database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

“Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”

With his decision, Mr. Malloy has stepped into a fiery debate that has stretched from the Oval Office to the contest to become its next occupant: Should being a terrorism suspect prohibit a person from buying firearms? At the moment, it does not.

With the mass shooting in California last week focusing attention on terrorism and guns, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced on Thursday that he intended to sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in the state.

President Obama has moved it to the front of his continuing push for stricter gun restrictions. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” he said in

While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.

What some critics have called a startling gap in the law has gnawed at counterterrorism officials for years. But it has now emerged as a flash point following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in which a married couple who the authorities believe were inspired by foreign extremists killed 14 people using legally obtained firearms.

But the argument, gun rights advocates say, is a matter of due process. They say that the no-fly list — with tens of thousands of names on it — is unreliable, with innocent people like Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who died in 2009, and other well-known Americans wrongly placed on the list.

While federal gun control legislation has gone nowhere in recent years, certain states have had more success. Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it was unclear what the practical implications of Connecticut’s proposed ban would be in stopping someone who is determined to carry out an act of terrorism. That person could simply travel to another state.

What fills the gap isn’t any distinctive ideology or religion but a kind of nothingness. The Bible is cited, but only as a plot device and a scene setter—in other words something incidental to the act of killing. On the radio, bible reciters are “disembodied” voices disconnected from the daily horrors of war.The book’s most violent character—who is also the closest thing American War has to a heroine—is not a believer; there is no investigation of deeply held beliefs and what they might entail. But the fact that no one seems to believe in any set of ideas particularly strongly does not impede their willingness to kill. It’s hard to know if the author, here, is trying to make an argument about the pointlessness of war—that there will always be a justification, with or without the divine.

In the actual Civil War, the one that happened, the question of the divine and, more specifically, of theodicy—why God permits evil—was at the forefront, but perhaps more so after the fact. Only one of the two sides, both of which prayed to the same God, could win. At the start of the war, after the first bloodless Southern victory at the Battle of Fort Sumter, many, particularly on the Southern side, assumed it would last weeks or months. When it was finally over, 2 percent of the American population was dead, making it one of the most bloody conflicts in human history. At the same time, it was one of the last conventional wars where death wasn’t quite mechanized. In infantry engagements, you had little choice but to look right at the people you were trying to kill. They generally looked like you, spoke the same language, and were around the same age.  

In this sense, ideas, including religious ideas—to the extent that they cut across ethnic, tribal, and partisan divisions—have the potential to be powerful obstacles to the breakdown of society and the violence that often ensues.

Getting Democrats to rediscover religion, then, isn’t just a matter of winning elections—as important as that may be—but of beginning to close a worsening divide that exacerbates polarization and further undermines any shared sense of national identity.

Voters might be irrational, but they aren’t stupid. They can sense disdain from their politicians, particularly when it comes to matters of identity.

Religion isn’t just a problem for Democrats, however. The weakness of American Christianity is leaving its mark on the Republican Party, with organized religion in decline among white Republicans

The ideological drift of recent years might have provided as opportune a moment as any for political Christianity to reassert itself among whites.

With a more secular generation coming of age, the percentage of Christian conservatives will continue to decrease. There will still be a Pence wing of the Republican Party, but it is likely to find itself increasingly intertwined with ethno-nationalism, confusing, perhaps permanently, which matters more—the white or the Christian—in White Christian. The assumption, long held by members of minority religious groups like myself, that a secular America would be a more tolerant, pluralistic, and therefore more stable place will be tested. In the meantime, we would do well to remember that demographic conflicts aren’t necessarily better than religious ones.

Human Rights Watch also identified 70 cases of deportees who disappeared after their return or suffered sexual violence, torture or other abuse, often by gangs.

The 138 cases included Salvadorans who had fled their homeland trying to escape the grip of gangs, as well as police who had been hounded by gangs and sought shelter in the United States. The majority were slain within a year of their return.

The number of Salvadorans seeking asylum in the United States skyrocketed as violence surged in their country — from about 5,600 in 2012 to more than 60,000 in 2017.

Homicides have declined sharply in El Salvador since 2015, plunging last year to 2,390 — or about 36 per 100,000 people.

But that’s still about seven times the U.S. rate, and thousands more people disappeared in 2019. Gangs and security forces both kill their victims secretly and hide the bodies to avoid prosecution.

Other studies showed different consequences. Children born during the pandemic grew into shorter, poorer, less educated adults with higher rates of physical disability than one would expect

the microorganisms likely killed more people than the war did. And their effects weren’t confined to European battlefields, but spread across the globe, emptying city streets and filling cemeteries on six continents.

Unlike the war, the flu was incomprehensible—the influenza virus wasn’t even identified until 1931. It inspired fear of immigrants and foreigners, and anger toward the politicians who played down the virus

killed more men than women, skewing sex ratios for years afterward. Can one be sure that the ensuing, abrupt changes in gender roles had nothing to do with the virus?

the accompanying flood of anti-Semitic violence. As it spread through Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the Low Countries, it left behind a trail of beaten cadavers and burned homes.

In northern Italy, landlords tended to raise wages, which fostered the development of a middle class. In southern Italy, the nobility enacted decrees to prevent peasants from leaving to take better offers. Some historians date the separation in fortunes of the two halves of Italy—the rich north, the poor south—to these decisions.

When the Black Death began, the English Plantagenets were in the middle of a long, brutal campaign to conquer France. The population losses meant such a rise in the cost of infantrymen that the whole enterprise foundered. English nobles did not occupy French châteaus. Instead they stayed home and tried to force their farmhands to accept lower wages. The result, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, nearly toppled the English crown. King Richard II narrowly won out, but the monarchy’s ability to impose taxes, and thus its will, was permanently weakened.

The coronavirus is hitting societies that regarded deadly epidemics as things of the past, like whalebone corsets and bowler hats.

The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences.

People sought new sources of authority, finding them through direct personal experience with the world and with God.

With the supply of European workers suddenly reduced and the demand for labor relatively unchanged, medieval landowners found themselves in a pickle: They could leave their grain to rot in the fields, or they could abandon all sense of right and wrong and raise wages enough to attract scarce workers

Within a few decades, Cohn wrote, hysteria gave way to sober observation. Medical tracts stopped referring to conjunctions of Saturn and prescribed more earthly cures: ointments, herbs, methods for lancing boils. Even priestly writings focused on the empirical. “God was not mentioned,” Cohn noted. The massacres of Jews mostly stopped.

the lesson seems more that humans confronting unexpected disaster engage in a contest for explanation—and the outcome can have consequences that ripple for decades or centuries.

Columbus’s journey to the Americas set off the worst demographic catastrophe in history

Somewhere between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the people in the Americas died. Many later European settlers, like my umpteen-great-grandparents, believed they were coming to a vacant wilderness. But the land was not empty; it had been emptied—a world of loss encompassed in a shift of tense.

Absent the diseases, it is difficult to imagine how small groups of poorly equipped Europeans at the end of very long supply chains could have survived and even thrived in the alien ecosystems of the Americas

“I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease,” the Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle remarked after President Trump announced his plan to do this. “I just think it’s 528 years too late.”

a possible legacy of Hong Kong’s success with SARS is that its citizens seem to put more faith in collective action than they used to

The result will be, among other things, a test of how much contemporary U.S. society values the elderly.

The speed with which pundits emerged to propose that the U.S. could more easily tolerate a raft of dead oldsters than an economic contraction indicates that the reservoir of appreciation for today’s elders is not as deep as it once was

the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. That epidemic, which killed about 300 people, was stopped only by heroic communal efforts. (As a percentage of the population, the equivalent U.S. death toll would be about 15,000.)

For Native peoples, the U-shaped curve was as devastating as the sheer loss of life. As an indigenous archaeologist once put it to me, the epidemics simultaneously robbed his nation of its future and its past: the former, by killing all the children; the latter, by killing all the elders, who were its storehouses of wisdom and experience.

Past societies mourned the loss of collective memory caused by epidemics. Ours may not, at least at first.

"For birds in particular, we've seen all of the warning bells go off that we're in a biodiversity crisis," said Umekubo. "By restoring these [federal] protections, we'll be giving them a fighting chance."

Courts have generally accepted the argument that the police need to make difficult, quick decisions while responding to perceived threats.

In Mr. Chauvin’s trial, prosecutors have argued that the defendant had ample time to change how he was subduing Mr. Floyd but did not, even after it was clear that Mr. Floyd had stopped moving.

Even when, as in the death of Mr. Floyd, much of the public views a killing as not justified and prosecutors believe they have strong evidence to prove that, the outcome is far from certain.

These were soldiers from the militaries of liberal democracies, avowedly promoting the rule of law and seeking to bring peace and stability to a country that has known little but conflict for generations. Yet some have been accused of the most serious crimes imaginable, of targeting civilians, of torturing captives, of slaughtering children.

In her 45-page report sent to Australian defence force chiefs, Crompvoets wrote of the “well-crafted reports” of special forces operations that offered legal justification for the actions of soldiers.

During Major Chris Green’s deployment with the UK’s Grenadier Guards in Helmand province in 2012, he became increasingly concerned that special forces tactics were undermining the coalition’s broader counterinsurgency mission.

“People knew laws were being broken, people understood the modus operandi of the night raids. But every time an operator reported back from these raids and didn’t find themselves in front of a tribunal that just further convinced them they were doing the right thing, that the laws didn’t apply to them.”

Saul argues there are drivers, too, of non-compliance with international humanitarian law. Moral disengagement emerges from combatants finding justifications for violations, and from a dehumanisation of the enemy.

Frank Ledwidge, a barrister and former military officer who served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, argues that over the course of the Afghan war, a culture developed among coalition special forces that celebrated violence, prioritised kill statistics and dehumanised those they fought.

The JPEL was a list of “kill or capture” objectives – targets that were considered combatants and could be lawfully killed. It was a dynamic document, with names being added or subtracted as intelligence came in. Allegedly this dynamism was exploited.

Australia’s initial involvement, between 2001 and 2002, was focused on combating al-Qaida: “We weren’t trying to seize and hold ground. It was a mission entirely appropriate for our special forces.”

“The multiple rotations of people into Afghanistan particularly, some operators went there 12 times. That must affect their mental health ... or impact the way they went about their operations. Certainly it would impact upon the judgment questions about why they are there.

“War is dynamic and imperfect and the freedom and autonomy in special forces is a double-edged sword,” one SAS member told Crompvoets.

When Sergeant Alexander Blackman of the Royal Marines shot a wounded, unarmed insurgent at point-blank range in the chest in Helmand in September 2011, he turned to his comrades and said: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broke the Geneva convention.”

“If there’s no structural change that challenges those power dynamics within special forces, there won’t be enduring changes.”

The U.N. report goes on: "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget and find' capability."

Azerbaijan used armed drones to gain a major advantage over Armenia in recent fighting for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Just last month, the Israel Defense Forces reportedly used drones to drop tear gas on protesters in the occupied West Bank, while Hamas launched loitering munitions — so-called kamikaze drones — into Israel.

While this incident may or may not represent the first battlefield killing by an autonomous drone, the idea of such a weapon is disquieting to many.

For Carter, it's about more than just social justice movements. He believes his city's leadership, especially the executive office, should reflect the population.

For Carter and other activists-turned-political candidates, making the decision to run felt like an actionable step after a year of such frustration and anger.

Tate took on criminal justice reform years before protests for Floyd took over streets across the country.

He created a name for himself while leading marches and protests following the deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky.

LaTonya Tate is not new to the fight to make the justice system more just. As a Black woman in the South and part of a family with a history of activism, it has been ever-present. And as a retired parole officer, she knows a good deal about the justice system and its failures.

Ossé is running for a seat on the city council representing his district in Brooklyn, New York. If elected, he would become one of the youngest, and one of the first self-described queer city council members in New York City.

She believes she can lead desperately needed and uncomfortable conversations if she is elected to the city council in Birmingham, Alabama.

Tate is advocating for community policing. She believes in reallocating funds from police to invest in the community with mental health training, health care, education, youth programs and social services.

Francois Alexandre believes that a community policing role is crucial for accountability. It's what he'd like to change when it comes to law enforcement in his district in Miami if he wins a seat on the Miami City Commission.

Charlotte, North Carolina City Council member Braxton Winston knows the path these activists are taking well. He was the subject of an iconic photo depicting the tension between police and protesters after an officer shot and killed Keith Scott, a Black Charlotte resident in 2016.

Winston's gained victories to defund chemical agents for crowd control, which he says led to a broader conversation about the overall role of government in ensuring public safety. He says he has learned that support and political will are essential and in ways he is not set up to succeed.

The Black Voters Matter organization, which aims to increase power in the black community through voter outreach and advocacy, says efforts are underway to engage black voters and to build voting power.

In June, the organization plans to launch a bus campaign to engage Black voters while commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides movement, bus tours taken by civil rights activists in the '60s to fight segregation in the South.

Carter hopes this can be a moment where the country looks deep into its soul and reckons with its past.

"There was a 2016 research survey by Pew of something like 7,800 law enforcement personnel all over the country," King continued. "They found that 73% of law enforcement officers have never fired their weapon, ever. Forty percent of the Vallejo police department had been in at least one shooting [according to Open Vallejo research], and about a third of those had been in two or more."

That includes now-fired Vallejo officer Ryan McMahon, who was involved in two fatal shootings, CNN affiliate KGO reports

McMahon shot 33-year-old Ronell Foster during a confrontation over a missing headlamp on Foster's bike

McMahon was one of six officers who opened fire on Willie McCoy, the 20-year-old who'd appeared to fall asleep in a fast food drive-through.

The string of fatal shootings by Vallejo officers, including the killing of 21-year-old Angel Ramos in 2017, led to protests as families of the deceased demanded answers and accountability

Williams, who is the city's first Black police chief, seemed to acknowledge this history at his swearing-in as he pledged to rebuild trust with a skeptical community, according to KGO. "Today," Williams said, "we chart a new direction."

On June 2, amid nationwide protests in response to George Floyd's death at the hands of police, 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by a Vallejo officer in a Walgreens parking lot. Police, who were investigating reports of looting, said a hammer in Monterrosa's pocket was mistaken for a gun.

In July, the troubling news continued: a report from Open Vallejo alleged that some Vallejo officers were bending the tips of their police badges to mark fatal shootings while on the job.

"It's important to me that we approach these community concerns with empathy and compassion," he continued. "Change takes time. I can't change the past, but I can impact the future -- and that's what we're focused on."