Long troubled and tenuous, the relationship between police departments and African-American communities is now toxic, and its repercussions may be most visible in the wounded eyes of black children. Since Brown’s death in August, scores of parents have brought their kids, some barely out of kindergarten, to protests nationwide and sparking discussions with them about racial profiling, police brutality, and the sad, but necessary refrain that “Black Lives Matter.”

In today’s economy, overwhelming debt is an unfortunate reality for millions of Americans. From credit card debt to mortgage debt to student loan debt, Americans increasingly live off of borrowed money. But few realize how the criminal justice system imposes increasing debts on individuals. Worse still, criminal justice debt perpetuates mass incarceration.

At 1:01 PM on Monday afternoon thousands of individuals—a large portion of whom are college and high school students—stopped what they were doing. In acts of remembrance of slain black teenager Michael Brown, people across the country staged die-ins, demonstrations, and fell quiet for four and a half minutes—a protest which they say is "only the beginning."

In an announcement today, the White House has pledged $263 million in new federal funding for police training and body cameras, including $75 million allocated specifically for the purchase 50,000 cameras for law enforcement officers across the country.

Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

Hundreds of protesters in Missouri have a begun a week-long long march organised by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in a move designed to inspire the spirit of the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, following a grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown.

What can be done to prevent more police killings like the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri? What can be done to dismantle institutional racism that encourages police to racially profile suspects and use overly aggressive tactics—including deadly force—and then protects abusive officers from facing criminal charges?

The events in Ferguson, Missouri this past week have been both shocking and traumatizing. We are a nation at war with ourselves and have been since the late 1980s when the terrible “war on drugs” began to take on a paramilitary tone – as defined by Webster’s dictionary “of or relating to a group that is not an official army but that operates and is organized like an army.”

When major strides are made in criminal justice reform—as just happened in California with the passage of Proposition 47, a law that will reduce penalties for nonviolent, low-level crimes—we tend to assume that those who will directly benefit are men of color, particularly black men. After all, if current incarceration trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to do time in prison. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, has stunned audiences nationwide by reporting that more black men are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole today than were enslaved in 1850.