Violence and looting has risen after a video depicting a policeman shooting 29-year old Jacob Blake in the back seven times went viral on social media, it sparked outrage, leading to violence and looting.

On August 23, 2020, police were attempting to arrest Jacob Blake, a 29-year old African- American Man, for violating a restraining order from alleged sexual assault. Jacob got his warrant by breaking into the house of a woman he knew and sexually assaulting her. The police were aware that he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault. 

Jacob Blake refused arrest and started to walk to his car where his three children were. As he was walking, the cops shot him with a taser to try and restrain him but it failed. When he opened his car door he was shot seven times in the back by Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha Police Department. Although the police officer wasn’t charged, Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that she believes the Kenosha Wisconsin Police officer who shot an unarmed black man in the back should be charged with a crime.

Jacob Blake was rushed to the hospital. Jacob was handcuffed to his hospital bed due to the warrant, which is now vacated, says Benjamin Crump Jacob’s lawyer. The handcuffs were then removed, but he is still facing criminal charges. Blake was undergoing surgery and was “struggling to sustain his life,” Crump added. “The medical diagnosis right now is that he is paralyzed and because those bullets severed his spinal cord and shattered some of his vertebrae… it is going to take a miracle for Jacob Blake Jr. to ever walk again,” Crump said. He is now paralyzed from the waist down.

Videos were released all over the web with some reaching over 1 million views. Protests started to get violent when two people were killed and one person was injured. This was just two days after the incident. However, this wasn’t the first video that has surfaced the web this year. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Michael Brown, and many others, have struck up protests, as well as riots. What more will come.