In a vacuum, it isn’t natural to pre-emptively shoot people to death, just as, in a vacuum, it isn’t natural to keep your gun trained on a person who has been rendered incapacitated and is bleeding out before you. This is specialized behavior, the sort expected from military forces entering unfamiliar war zones. Soldiers are trained to consider everyone and everything a potential threat, to neutralize any man, woman or child who could potentially cause them harm. The highest priorities are to protect themselves and to accomplish their mission, and that requires the trained dehumanization of the local population. In such an environment, the burden of not killing is lifted from the soldiers, and local people are tasked with the burden of not provoking death.

…The nation’s thruways are not war zones. In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force. You can see their training at work when an officer fires into a car with a 4-year-old child in it. You can see it when Reynolds is directed to get out of the car, lift her hands over her head and walk backward toward a group of officers: Her camera glimpses several guns aimed squarely at her back.

… Reynolds knows to de-escalate the situation by being reassuring, even encouraging, to the man who just shot her boyfriend. She knows that her boyfriend is likely to die. She knows to document everything, to give her own accounting of events, to create a record. She knows what will come next.

…There’s a specific cadence to cop killings. State violence is so ubiquitous and visible that citizens, experienced, can recognize its approach.

…We know what comes next. Both Castile and Sterling will be further dehumanized; their pasts will be pillaged, and attempts will be made to recast both victims as the gunmen, the aggressors who brought their deaths upon themselves. The officers will argue that both shootings were in keeping with their training — that, in effect, they accomplished their mission. The police officers may even get off. They normally do.

How the Police See Us, and How They Train Us to See Them – The New York Times

This. Every fucking single word of this.