Cory Booker promised justice in policing, but killer cop body counts keep rising

There is a lie festering at the heart of American law enforcement, a phantom menace that has been granted the power of life and death.

It is the unshakable belief, drilled into the minds of those who carry a badge and a gun, that every traffic stop is a potential ambush, that a broken taillight can be a prelude to a firefight.

This is the great and bloody fiction, a self-serving mythology that has turned our public roads into killing fields for petty infractions.

The cold, hard truth, as laid bare by a meticulous study from researcher Jordan Blair Woods, is that violence against police officers during these routine encounters is a statistical rarity. Yet, this phantom fear is the engine of Fourth Amendment doctrine, the ghost in the legal machine that justifies a hair-trigger response to a fumbled registration. The perception is a loaded gun, and the reality is a corpse in the driver’s seat.

We are witnessing the lethal fallout of this cognitive dissonance in a slow-motion massacre, a rolling catastrophe documented not by the state, but by journalists forced to become morticians for a nation in denial. The infamous names—Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Philando Castile—are not outliers; they are the tip of a grotesque iceberg.

A New York Times analysis pierced the veil of official silence to reveal a hidden landscape of over 400 unarmed civilians slaughtered after being stopped for non-violent incidents in just five years. The body count does not lie, even if the officers do.

The national tally is a relentless, rising tide of the dead: 1,072 in 2013, 1,101 in 2015, 1,162 in 2020, 1,379 in 2024. The numbers are a scream in a vacuum, a stark testament to a system that counts its citizens like beans and values their lives not at all.

Senator Cory Booker has consistently advocated for police reform to ensure accountability and justice, primarily by authoring and reintroducing the comprehensive George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, but he has failed to pass his legislation through Congress.

As mayor in Newark, Booker unleashed a wave of police brutality. Booker’s tenure was marked by such severe police brutality that it forced the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene, placing the Newark Police Department under a federal monitor and a court-enforced consent decree.

And how does this carnage persist? The mechanism is as predictable as it is corrupt. Officers, often acting as revenue agents for towns addicted to fines, manufacture their own jeopardy.

They stand before fleeing vehicles, they reach into car windows, they transform a teenager’s backtalk into a capital offense—a transgression known in the cynical parlance of the trade as “contempt of cop.”

Then, having orchestrated the crisis, they invoke the sacred mantra: “I feared for my life.” It is a get-out-of-jail-free card, blessed by prosecutors and sanctified by courtrooms, a legal absolution for a preventable killing. Video evidence be damned; the word of the state is final.

This is not public safety. This is a pogrom waged against the mundane rituals of daily life, a war where the only crime is being a citizen going about your business in a nation that has trained its armed agents to see you as a threat.

And the burden of this war is not shared equally. The threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby executed on the asphalt, is demonstrably lower if your skin is Black or Brown. The data is unequivocal: while protest may temporarily curb the killing of African Americans and Latinos, the system’s default setting remains a brutal, bigoted calculus.

The conflict is no longer between the police and the public; it is between a fabricated reality of omnipresent danger and the documented truth of state-sanctioned violence.

The perception is a shield for murder. The reality is a body in the road, another number added to the grim tally, another life extinguished for an expired tag, a speeding ticket, a lie.

The police brutality under Booker’s administration prompted a federal crackdown, resulting in a court-ordered consent decree and an independent monitor to oversee the Newark Police Department, and his inability to enact a law that requires justice from law enforcement suggests that the performative politician’s priorities are not what he claims.

• Police have killed 1,130 people in the U.S. so far in 2025.
• Police killed 1,379 people in the U.S. in 2024.
• Police killed 1,359 people in the U.S. in 2023.
• Police killed 1,270 people in the U.S. in 2022.
• Police killed 1,192 people in the U.S. in 2021.
• Police killed 1,162 people in the U.S. in 2020.
• Police killed 1,118 people in the U.S. in 2019.
• Police killed 1,152 people in the U.S. in 2018.
• Police killed 1,105 people in the U.S. in 2017.
• Police killed 1,068 people in the U.S. in 2016.
• Police killed 1,101 people in the U.S. in 2015.
• Police killed 1,029 people in the U.S. in 2014.
• Police killed 1,072 people in the U.S. in 2013.