Mon. Apr. 12 at 10 pm on WKAR-HD 23.1 & STREAMING | Two marginalized communities must navigate an uneven criminal justice system together.On a fall night in 2014, Peter Liang, a Chinese American police officer, shot and killed an innocent, unarmed Black man named Akai Gurley. The event unfolded in a dark stairwell of the Pink Houses housing project in Brooklyn, New York. While conducting a routine patrol of the building, Liang fired his gun; the bullet ricocheted off of a wall and fatally struck Gurley.
With the country reeling from the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and activists nationwide calling for police reform, Gurley’s death further inflamed the residents of New York City. Cries of police brutality rang out to join a chorus protesting the recent police killings of unarmed Black men. Peter Liang joined a high-decibel national conversation about race and the justice system, one that continued to crescendo when just days later, an officer in Cleveland, Ohio, shot and killed a 12-year-old African American boy playing with a toy gun.
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Independent Lens is a weekly series airing on PBS Monday nights at 10:00 PM. The acclaimed series, with Lois Vossen as executive producer, features documentaries united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of independent filmmakers.