Why a portrait artist from Ireland started making comics about U.S. police brutality

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/10/ [login to see] /cartoon-illustrations-police-brutality-pan-cooke
After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in the summer of 2020, the entire United States watched as protests against police brutality rocked cities from coast to coast. And while the U.S. was grappling with questions of race and justice, the rest of the world looked on, too.

That included the Irish illustrator Pan Cooke. As a white man who lived thousands away from the ongoing protests, the racial reckoning gave him the chance to educate himself about why police brutality had been dominating headlines.

"It was a topic that I was very ignorant to and wanted to learn more about it," Cooke said.

While researching cases of police violence, he came across the story of Eric Garner, a Black man who was killed by Staten Island police in 2014. Learning about what happened to Garner, Cooke began to create and share cartoons illustrating Garner's story, as well as other cases connected to police brutality and racism, on his Instagram page.