I don't expect justice to be done for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile - I'm not that naive

Another week, another two black men shot dead by police.

The names “Alton Sterling” and “Philando Castile” will be added to an ever increasing list including Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Walter Scott and Laquan McDonald.

Philando Castile’s girlfriend Lavish Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of his shooting on Facebook; the video shows him covered in blood with a police officer pointing his gun at him. She says that they were pulled over for having a broken tail-light on their car. A child can be heard crying from the back seat in the video.

“You shot four bullets in him, sir. He was just getting his licence and registration, sir,” Lavish Reynolds is heard to say in the video.

Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge in Florida when police received a report that he had threatened someone with a gun.

In the video footage filmed by a bystander, two white police officers arrive on the scene and appear to slam Sterling to the ground. The gun was not in his hand at the time, according to a witness who owned a shop beside the carpark. To carry a concealed handgun is legal in Louisiana, a state with some of the most lenient gun laws in the US.

More than 100 unarmed black people were killed last year alone by police. With two deaths every week, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s names could have been wiped from national consciousness as soon as the next big story hit the headlines. But thanks to videos filmed by witnesses (both policemen present during Sterling’s shooting claimed their body cameras became dislodged) the public won’t be able to cast aside their stories so quickly.

Neither of these videos show violent altercations: no serious scuffles, no apparent immediate threat. In Sterling’s case, the police officer is pictured on top of a defenceless person on the ground. He has a knee in his chest. A second policeman is holding his legs. He can hardly move. In Castile’s case, he is filmed sitting inside his car, bleeding through his shirt.

Alton Sterling won’t get the chance to say he was just selling CDs in the same spot he had been for six years, and that he had just bought a drink in the convenience store and was joking around with the owner. He won’t see a police warrant, he won’t get a chance to say goodbye to his family. He asked the police what he did wrong, but he will never get an answer. He won’t get the chance to argue the illogical nature of his supposed crime - that he was carrying a gun in a state where it is legal to do so.

While Sterling is lying on the ground, powerless, the police officer near his legs calls out “Gun!” and the second officer reaches into his holster, pulled out his gun and shoots the 37-year-old man in the chest at extremely close range – not once, but several times. He has already used a stun gun on the man described as “laid back” and who “never got into fights”, according to Triple S store owner Abduallah Muflahi who had known him for six years.

The witnesses’ videos quickly spread online, and the national frenzy began. Yet as District Attorney Hillar C Moore III took to the podium in the hours after Sterling’s death, the stage was already set.

He congratulated the local police for lowering murder rates last year by 37 per cent, and he warned the out of towners not to “cause harm” by protesting. He also thanked the local media for treating the police “fairly”. His five-minute speech was shocking in its routine predictability. He only referred to Sterling’s death as an “issue”. There was little recognition that this concerned the loss of a human life.

In the same way that President Obama warned against the “routine” response to and reporting of mass shootings, the public are becoming jaded when it comes to law enforcement killing the people they are supposed to protect.

During a live press conference, Sterling’s 15-year-old son Cameron broke down as he stood alongside his mother during a live press conference, weeping uncontrollably and calling out: “I want my daddy."

The public has seen countless videos of black men being shot from behind as they run away in fear, of black pupils being body slammed by police in a school classroom, of black teenagers being violently grabbed and thrown around by police just for riding their bikes through a carpark.

Hillary Clinton said recently in Harlem that schools are more segregated now than in 1968.

We’ve seen the media demonise the black mother of a young boy who fell into a gorilla enclosure, yet it stayed respectfully silent when the boy of a white mother was dragged to his death by an alligator in Florida just weeks later.

However chilling the footage of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and however heart-breaking the sight of a crying, now fatherless teenager, we are left with one even more haunting question: what about all those cases of police violence and aggression against black people that were not caught on camera, or go unreported?

Even though 102 unarmed black people were killed by police last year, only two of the officers involved were convicted of a crime.

When it comes to justice for Sterling and Castile’s families, the odds are stacked against them.