NZNTV

KILLING. A year ago today, a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, catalyzing a firestorm of protests and re-animating national conversations on issues of race, policing, and violence in the US.

Michael Brown’s bleeding corpse was subsequently left facedown in the middle of the road for four hours on the afternoon on August 9, 2014 — exposed to the midday summer sun and eyes of residents, a few of whom snapped cellphone images that would eventually spread across social media, the nation, and the world. At Brown’s funeral, two weeks later, the Reverend Al Sharpton remarked that the 19-year-old was left laying in Canfield drive like his « life… didn’t matter » — an observation that protesters set out to disprove when they took to the streets en masse over several months to declare that Brown’s and all « black lives matter. »

The protests, die-ins, and marches proceeded throughout the winter and into what some have called a « Black Spring » — a new civil rights movement led by a by a social media-wielding youth contingent. Occasionally, as more incidences of police killings came to light, the actions broke out in violence in Ferguson and in Baltimore, where 25-year-old Freddie Gray’s spine was crushed while in police custody in April.

Since then, the rallies for justice have not abated, and neither have the number of deaths at the hands of police. At least 1,083 Americans have been killed by cop since August 9, 2014, according to comprehensive research and data collected by VICE News — an average of nearly three people a day.