Rest in peace, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.

I cried today watching the video of Philando Castile bleeding to death while the police uselessly looked on. A horrific spate of police violence is playing out across America, in vastly disproportionate measure against people of color. We are faced with the fact that the American criminal justice system in 2016 is just that, criminal. When the lives of innocent people are taken by those in power, something is terribly wrong.

For decades, both politicians and the Supreme Court have been building and defending a system of control that seems better designed to increase crime than prevent it, with much of its administration carried out in a manner that is clearly influenced by racial bias. Do these claims seem too strong? They are not. Study after study prove that in America, “justice” is served in a profoundly racially biased manner at every level of the criminal justice process, from stop-and-frisks, to pretextual police stops, to jury selection, to sentencing. This is a parallel universe that exists to this day, a shameful reality that seems to date from a bygone era.

We have to examine, why were Philando, Alton, and too many other victims of police brutality and homicide stopped in the first place? Were these actions justified by “reasonable suspicion”? The answer is no. Castile was stopped for having a tail light out. Samuel Dubose was stopped for not having a front license plate. Sandy Bland was stopped for a failure to turn on her turn signal at the right time. These seemingly innocuous episodes were motivated by racial bias, and ended in violence, detention, and death.

In her landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander examines the ways in which the criminal justice system rationalizes, targets, convicts, and imprisons people of color at staggering rates. Here are some of the key points she brings to light when examining how and why encounters with the police go wrong:

• Unchecked Police Discretion: There are very few constraints on the police when making judgments about who to detain. “Reasonable suspicion” is so loosely defined that police officers essentially have free reign to use their discretion to decide whom to stop and question, allowing conscious and unconscious bias to creep in. In fact, police are legally empowered to select people to stop on the basis of race. (The legal basis for this is a 1975 Supreme Court ruling establishing race as a permissible factor in police stops, as long as it is not the sole factor. But in practice, additional factors can be quite frivolous.)
• Pretextual Stops: Thanks to the “war on drugs,” drug convictions account for 2/3 of the increase in the prison population from 1985 to 2000. Pretextual police stops such as failing to turn on a turn signal at the appropriate time or having a tail light out are a common tool officers legally use to facilitate drug searches. Many police departments actually train their officers on how to use these techniques effectively. These pretextual stops form the basis for many police encounters that lead to violence.
• What Happened to the Fourth Amendment?: Once police have stopped someone, consent must be obtained in order to perform a search or conduct questioning. In America, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure is a fundamental right protected by the 4th amendment. However, the courts have granted dozens of exceptions in drug cases, to the point that legal scholars recognize there is a virtual “drug exception” to the 4th amendment. Additionally, studies have shown that the necessity to obtain consent for these searches is ineffectual as most people feel obligated to comply with police demands and police do not inform people that they have the right of refusal.
• Unjustified, Unequal Targeting: Whites are more likely than blacks to be carrying illegal contraband according to police statistics. Additionally, members of all races use illegal drugs at relatively similar rates, with white professionals being slightly more likely than any other group to use them. Yet people of color are more likely to be stopped and searched, despite the fact that they are less likely to be breaking the law.
• Police Department Incentives: Local police departments are richly incentivized to act as soldiers in the “war on drugs,” and this is accomplished through two primary means: 1) federal grants that give local police departments funding as well as military equipment (such as the Edward Byrne Memorial JAG program), and 2) a law that was passed in 1984 allowing police departments to keep the spoils of their drug busts through civil forfeiture.
• Spray and Pray: Stop-and-frisk searches and auto stops by police results in thousands of searches a year with only a 2% resulting in finding any illegal contraband. Why? Instead of marshaling the resources needed to pinpoint and nail drug kingpins, many police departments take the easy route known as spray and pray — targeting low-level drug users and often pinning first-time offenders with harsh sentences. Officers are then free to confiscate possessions such as cars, real estate, and cash. There are even instances of police specifically targeting the owners of property that they want.

In 2010, when Alexander wrote her book, the rise in police violence had yet to reach its current crescendo. Unjustified police stops, arrests, and convictions often without access to legal counsel are terrible enough. Today, tensions have risen to the breaking point and the better armed, more powerful side is wreaking destruction on the unarmed and the innocent. In the vast majority of cases — 97% — police are not held accountable for the atrocities they commit.

This is a mockery of what a justice system should be, and a failure of human rights. There are few checks and balances on police power. Bias is allowed to run rampant. These things must change. America must wake up to the injustice that is deeply rooted in the criminal justice system itself.