SLIPPERY ROCK — With more than 300 black or brown people killed by police officers in 2012 and more since, Makunga Akinyela said the U.S. government is allowing a genocide of black people because few of those officers are ever charged.

“Because the state is permitting it, that’s how we generally understand it,” Akinyela said Thursday at Slippery Rock University.

Akinyela, the founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the director of undergraduate African American Studies at Georgia State University, presented the movement’s report “Operation Ghetto Storm,” which details the 313 cases where people of color were killed by police in 2012.

He spoke to about 40 people at a discussion titled “Understanding Ferguson: Dismantling Police Brutality in Black and Brown Communities.”

His appearance was sponsored by the SRU NAACP chapter and was a part of SRU’s Black History Month.

In the report, it was discovered that a non-white person is killed by police, security officers or vigilantes every 28 hours, he said.

He said the number of deaths cannot be attributed to bad training because he said bad training would mean that a similar number of white people would be killed as well.

Akinyela said the police are following their training and walk around certain communities looking at people of color as enemies.

“The enemy has an identity: the black and brown communities,” Akinyela said.

In Chicago, 32.9 percent of the population is black, but 91 percent of the people killed by police there in 2012 were black.

In states with a higher population of black people, there were more people of color killed by police, including 29 in Texas and 23 in California. However, he noted several states with fewer black people had no police killings in 2012.

“Where there are black people, there are extrajudicial killings,” Akinyela said.

In 22 percent of the cases studied, the person killed had mental health problems. In 19 percent of the cases, the police response came after a call to 911 for an emotionally disturbed family member.

About 43 percent of cases came from singling out the person while driving or doing other activities.

“They just didn’t look right. They were black; they were big; they were male,” Akinyela said.

“This genocide is being posed on the entire black community,” Akinyela said.

Of the police officers involved, 277 were never charged. Two were convicted of manslaughter, two were convicted of vehicle violations and two cases are pending.

“Very little is done when these things happen,” Akinyela said.

To help end this, he said the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement urges changes.

These include an immediate end to the “war on drugs,” which he said targets black people over white people; to immediately end stop-and-frisk and other police techniques related to the broken windows theory; the demilitarization of police; and to end “no knock” warrants.

He said other changes including the end of mass incarceration, the end of the “school to prison pipeline” and the establishment of community police review boards with the power to fire in certain cases such as these.

“The police cannot investigate the police,” Akinyela said.

The final effort is to have the U.S. charged with willful genocide of its black population and to have reparations be paid.

He said the definition of genocide is the destruction in whole or part of a people, which he said has taken place to blacks, as well as Native Americans and native Hawaiians, over the past few centuries.

As far as reparations, he noted there is an international precedent, such as with Jewish people following World War II, Japanese Americans who were in internment camps during World War II and Native Americans who had land taken.

Akinyela said the protests since the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., last summer have been helpful.

He said some of the protests, including blocking a highway or blocking parts of a shopping mall, could be considered inconvenient. However, he noted that could lead to change, saying the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts in the 1950s lasted nearly a year, forcing a negotiation.

“This is about bringing people to the negotiation table,” Akinyela said.