It’s hard to think of anything that was uglier in post-slavery America than lynching. From 1882 to 1964, the archives at Tuskegee University documented that at least 3,445 African Americans were brutally lynched in the United States. While these lynchings are most commonly remembered as hangings from trees, the lynchings in this statistic include men, women, and children who were shot, burned, and beaten to death in every tortuous way imaginable. At its core, to be lynched is not a method of killing, but it is to be murdered without due process.

What is often overlooked is that police, during the height of lynching, were complicit in most lynchings. In the book Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, it was determined that 64 percent of lynching victims in the early 20th century were actually seized from jails.

While historical lynchings and modern-day murders at the hands of police have some differences, many of the legal, physical, and emotional parallels are frightening. What follows below the fold are seven troubling similarities between the two.

More: Five Ugly and Uncanny Parallels Between Lynchings and Police Killings in America