A 15-year-old black kid is killed by a white cop. Lead by a wonderfully imperfect black female prosecutor, the new series explores the intricacies of a depressingly common scenario.

If I told you that a 15-year-old black kid was killed by a white police officer, you probably wouldn't be as shocked as you should be. If I explained how, along with his colleagues, the officer tried to cover up the death on the assumption that the kid was 'probably a banger' (in a gang), I doubt you'd be particularly taken a back by that fact either.

It's a depressing normality that, against the backdrop of the recent investigation into the fatal shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man who was shot at 20 times by police officers in his back garden, is only settling deeper in to our understanding of how race relations and the American justice system seem to be operating.

This innate sentiment of racially-charged injustice and mistrust of the legal system is the undercurrent that drives Netflix's new ten-part series Seven Seconds. In it, the 15-year-old is called Brenton Butler. He's not shot, but rather killed in the opening scene of the very first episode, the victim of a hit-and-run by Jersey City Police Department's narcotics newbie and expectant father, Pete Jablonski. He's distracted on the phone, trying to get hold of his pregnant wife, when he hits Butler and on discovering the boy's bike crushed beneath his car, calls his cop colleagues for help.

https://thedebrief.co.uk/things-to-do/ ... n-seconds-netflix-review/