#BrownLivesMatter: Shootings of Unarmed Latinos by Police Continuously Earns Muted Reactions

While the shooting death and chokehold strangling of unarmed African American men and women by police officers has been mainstreamed, there has been distinct silence surrounding police killings of unarmed Latino men and women.

Many who are vocal on the matter insist that #BrownLivesMatter tells a very different story than #BlackLivesMatter.

The national Black Lives Matter movement was sparked because African Americans are overrepresented among police shooting victims across the nation. The recent deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and numerous others has worked to fuel anger within the black community, and community members often take their frustrations to social media and the streets to vent frustrations about routine violence against black bodies. However, noticeably, there hasn't been a national reaction to the death of unarmed Latinos even though the Latino community is enraged by the loss of life. Media giants seem to be unwilling to look at the deaths of unarmed Latinos, particularly when it concerns undocumented immigrants.

"When it comes to Latinos, American media still only think of them as immigrants," said Gustavo Arellano, Editor of the newspaper O.C. Weekly, to Diversity Inc. "They can't think of them as victims of police brutality or anything else but immigrants. "For me, killing an unarmed person is killing an unarmed person and the media should scrutinize that, and see Latinos as being unduly victimized by the police."

In Washington, D.C. during the month of February, police shot and killed unarmed Mexican-born undocumented orchard worker Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was caught throwing rock at cars while allegedly under the influence of meth. When police intercepted him, he began to run away and officers reacted by shooting the limited English-speaker 17 times, also striking him five or six times.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, California is home to more than two million undocumented immigrants, and 79 percent of those individuals are from Latin America, with 52 percent being from Mexico, alone. Likewise, Los Angeles County has the highest number of undocumented immigrants in the stage, nearly 815,000. Nearly half (48.3 percent) of Los Angeles County is Hispanic/Latino, and nearly half of unarmed individuals shot by police in that county are also Latino. Of the 23 people fatally shot by law enforcement in L.A. County this year, 14 were Latino.

Gardena police killed Ricardo Diaz Zeferino, an unarmed Latino, in early June; his shooting death was published on YouTube, receiving millions of hits. Nonetheless, there seemed to be muted reactions to his death. Neither the Sheriff's Department nor Gardena police officials would state if Diaz-Zeferino had a weapon. An officer claimed that he saw Diaz-Zeferino and another man on bicycles coming from the direction of an alleged robbery.

Many believe that black churches have played a large role in boosting the Black Lives Matter movement, while Catholic churches don't make noise about the death of Latinos, particuarly when they are undocumented. This forces many to believe that their churches and their communities don't have the same investiment in the lives lost.