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 The 9-year-old Charlotte girl whose tearful testimony on racism and policing Monday captured attention around the world said her decision to address City Council was a last-minute one. 
 
 "I was a little nervous, so I decided to just go up there and tell them how I feel," Zianna Oliphant, told NBC News Tuesday. 
 
 "I was just feeling like what the police are doing to us, just because of our skin, is not right,” the fourth-grader said. 
 
 Zianna and her brother, Marquis, both spoke at a City Council meeting in which members of the city’s black community called for changes after police fatally shot an African-American man, Keith Lamont Scott, last week. 
 
 Related: Bomb Scare Shuts Down Charlotte Police Headquarters 
 
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 Police say Scott was armed. The shooting death and questions over the use of deadly police force against people of color sparked protests that roiled the city. 
 
 "We are black people and we shouldn't have to feel like this. We shouldn't have to protest because y'all are treating us wrong," the girl said Monday. “We do this because we need to and have rights.” 
 
 Tuesday, Zianna said she watched coverage of the police shooting and the protests on the news with her mother, Precious Oliphant 
 
 "I was kind of emotional, because, like, the things that I said is like powerful to me. So that’s why I started crying," Zianna said. 
 
 Related: Why Charlotte Police Chief Was "Least Likely' to Go Into Force 
 
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 Zianna’s mother said she was proud of her daughter. 
 
 "I was also emotional — because I shouldn’t have to enlighten my kids on discrimination and racism," Precious Oliphant said. She brought the children to the meeting, but it had not been planned for them to speak, she said. 
 
 She noted that Zianna and her brother are actually involved in a police youth league and the children are frequently around officers who do great things for them. 
 
 "They are being a valuable aspect in their lives and being role models, they are teaching them responsibility, dedication and commitment," Oliphant said. 
 
 Zianna Oliphant is consoled after addressing the Charlotte City Council during time for public comments, mainly concerning last week's Scott shooting, at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Government Center on Monday, Sept. 26, 2016. David T. Foster III / The Charlotte Observer via AP 
 
 But she said that growing up in Charlotte, she has been pulled over for what she suspects were trivial issues, like the way she wore her hair or was otherwise perceived — and she worries that her children will be discriminated against as well. 
 
 Related: Charlotte Police Release Video From Keith Scott Shooting 
 
 Some at the council meeting called on Charlotte Police Chief Kerry Putney and the city’s mayor to resign over their handling of Scott’s death. 
 
 "It’s not hate. We don’t hate the police," Oliphant said. “We hate how we are treated by the police, how we are targeted by the police.” 
 
 Zianna said she wants to grow up to be a doctor, because she likes helping people. In the meantime, she doesn’t appear afraid to speak her mind. 
 
 "Kids, they’re, like, shy. But I’m not shy to tell them how I feel about it," she said. ||||| Photo: Courtesy of YouTube/Sapphire 
 
 “I come here today to talk about how I feel,” began Zianna Oliphant at a Charlotte citizens’ forum on Monday. The young girl was one of many who attended the gathering hosted by Charlotte’s City Council. In the week since the death of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was shot by police in Charlotte, the city has been embroiled in protests. Newly released video appears to support claims that Scott was not behaving in a threatening manner in the moments leading up to his death. 
 
 Through tears, Oliphant continued her speech saying: “We are black people and we shouldn’t have to feel like this.” Adding: “It’s a shame that our fathers and mothers are killed and we can’t even see them anymore. It’s a shame that we have to go to their graveyard and bury them. We have tears and we shouldn’t have tears. We need our fathers and mothers to be by our side.” 
 
 As her time on the podium drew to a close, the room erupted in applause and some chanted: “No justice, no peace.” ||||| The first study of its kind found 911 calls in black Milwaukee neighborhoods dropped significantly following the beating of Frank Jude, an unarmed black man. And then crime rates rose. 
 
 A man raises his fist during a protest Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016, in El Cajon, Calif. A new study offers numerical evidence high-profile police violence leads black communities to call 911 to report crimes less. 
 
 In 2004, Frank Jude Jr., an unarmed black man, was viciously beaten by at least 10 white, off-duty police officers outside a housewarming party in Milwaukee because they said he stole one of their badges. 
 
 When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news more than three months later, not one of the police officers had been charged or arrested, even though the city knew who they were. 
 
 In the six months that followed, 911 calls from black neighborhoods to report crimes plummeted as the city’s murder rate jumped. The decline in 911 calls is symptomatic of a loss of confidence in law enforcement, according to the study and criminal justice experts. And that trust deficit then leads to rising violent crime rates. 
 
 “An important implication of this finding is that publicized cases of police violence not only threaten the legitimacy and reputation of law enforcement; they also – by driving down 911 calls – thwart the suppression of law breaking, obstruct the application of justice, and ultimately make cities as a whole, and the black community in particular less safe,” reads the study, “Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community,” that will appear in the October edition of the American Sociological Review. 
 
 These are the results of a study of the effect high-profile excessive force by police against unarmed black men have on an entire community, which Matthew Desmond, the lead author and a sociologist at Harvard University, said is the first empirical study of its kind. 
 
 The mistrust and, perhaps, discontent the study shows in Milwaukee has been mirrored in similar cases across the country in the decade since, with flashpoints in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Chicago, and now Charlotte, N.C. At the same time, the number of people murdered in the country in 2015 experienced the first substantial increase in a quarter-century, leading many to ask why. 
 
 Some observers have argued that police, in the face of public scrutiny, have pulled back from their duties, the so-called “Ferguson Effect.” But the soon-to-be published study offers empirical evidence to the contrary. Police have not stopped doing their job. Nor has gang violence turned city blocks into war zones. Rather, the deaths of young black men at the hands of law enforcement can lead whole communities, distrustful of police, to withdraw from the country’s criminal justice system. 
 
 “What this paper does is add something very important to the understanding of what those mechanisms are,” says David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities, a project at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. "Breaches in the confidence that communities have in the police, themselves, lead to disengagement in the criminal justice system, which leads to increased violence and crime." 
 
 “It makes absolutely perfect sense that when communities have experience in what they regard as an egregious instance of police behavior, they are less interested and less willing to cooperate with the police,” continues Mr. Kennedy, who was not involved in the study. “Now the study says that. It’s not just conjecture. It’s as close as we get in social science to fact. And that’s connected to very substantial increases in violence.” 
 
 The study was conducted by Dr. Desmond and two other sociologists, Andrew Papachristos at Yale University, and David Kirk at the University of Oxford. They looked at every crime-related 911 call in Milwaukee from March 2004 to December 2010. They calculated that in the six months after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news that Mr. Jude was left bloody and half-naked in the street, the number of crime-related 911 calls in the city decreased by about 22,000, to about 110,000. Fifty-six percent of this decline occurred in predominantly black neighborhoods. 
 
 The number of crime-related 911 calls would return to normal after about a year, the authors found. However, the six-month decrease from March through August 2005 led to the most violent stretch in the seven years the authors looked at. During those six months, there were 87 murders in Milwaukee, a 32-percent increase compared to the same six-month periods in 2004 and 2006. 
 
 The number of 911 calls in all Milwaukee neighborhoods also declined significantly following the high-profile killing of Sean Bell by police in Queens, N.Y. in 2006, suggesting the fallout of police violence is not an “isolated incident,” as the authors write “police departments and city politicians often frame [it].” 
 
 African Americans’ lack of confidence in police has been well documented through surveys and testimonies. Just this week, 9-year-old Zianna Oliphant was filmed telling the Charlotte City Council about being black. 
 
 “I don’t like being treated differently,” she said through tears at the City Council’s first meeting since Keith Lamont Scott was killed in an officer-involved shooting six days earlier. 
 
 The Pew Research Center has consistently found African Americans don’t trust police will treat them equally to whites. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, 46 percent of black respondents told Pew they had “very little” confidence in police to treat them equally. 
 
 But observers have debated over whether a lack of confidence in police has led African Americans to not report crime. It doesn’t, according to a 2006 study by Lawrence Bobo and Victor Thompson. A vast of majority of both whites and black respondents said they would call 911 if their house was burglarized, even if an overwhelmingly majority of blacks didn’t expect to be taken seriously when police arrived. 
 
 This changes in the wake of high-profile police violence in the news, according to the soon-to-be published study. It is perceived by some as a “severe breach in the social contract that exists between citizens and the criminal justice system.” 
 
 “That breach is so sudden and violent when unarmed black men are beaten or killed that virtually no institutional response, from public apologies to sanctioning offending officers, can swiftly repair it,” the study says. 
 
 In an interview with the Monitor, Tony Brown, a sociologist at Rice University who studies how racism works, was skeptical of the implications of the study. He praised its analysis, but said the personal motivations that led whole neighborhoods to call 911 less frequently must be studied further. He also stressed the conclusions should be considered within a larger context, namely how the country and its race relations have changed since 2005, and speculated about the so-called “Ferguson Effect,” which FBI Director James Comey referred to in May, but many criminologists and President Obama have rejected. 
 
 Whatever those motivations, Dr. Kirk at Oxford said in a statement that police should take seriously the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, in particular its recommendations for procedural justice, transparency, and accountability. 
 
 Mr. Kennedy at John Jay says many departments are. 
 
 “For the longest time, police never criticized police. That’s a real problem for communities that already don’t think highly of you,” he says. “Across the country, we’re just beginning to see police are willing to say to their community, ‘I think that’s wrong too.’ That’s an important development.”
– The shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott last week hit hard in Charlotte, NC. But someone who's feeling particular distress over it is young Zianna Oliphant, who spoke at a Charlotte City Council meeting Monday evening, addressing a hushed room with tears streaming down her cheeks as she spoke of the black experience and police brutality, New York reports. "I come here today to talk about how I feel," Zianna started off. "I feel like … we are treated differently than other people. … We are black people and we shouldn't have to feel like this." What especially drew the crowd's attention, in addition to Zianna's words and how emotional she was: the fact that she's a 9-year-old fourth-grader who spontaneously took the podium, per NBC News. "I decided to just go up there and tell them how I feel," she says. "I've been born and raised in Charlotte and I never felt this way till now," she said, breaking down. "And I can't stand how we're treated. … It's a shame that our fathers and mothers are killed and we can't even see them anymore. … We need our fathers and mothers to be by our side." Her mom, Precious Oliphant, tells NBC both Zianna and her brother, who also spoke at the meeting, are involved in a police youth league with cops who serve as "role models," showing them the ropes of "responsibility, dedication, and commitment." But Oliphant adds she's been pulled over by police for what she thinks were trivial things, and she doesn't want her kids to have that same experience, or to face danger. As for Zianna, she's not afraid to forge her own path for the future. "I'm not shy to tell them how I feel about it," she says.