Wednesday, April 21, 2021

How we "forget" about the other victims of police shootings

 

While the Seattle Times had its entire front page above the cutline of its print edition covered with a photo from yesterday’s guilty verdict in the death of George Floyd, there are plenty of others asking “What about our people? Just because we are not mass protesting, committing property damage or have people standing by to take viral videos shouldn’t mean that it is open season on us.” I have to tell you, Black Lives Matter protesters in New York yelling at white customers at the Mexican restaurant Maya Taqueria to “get the fuck out of New York” says more about the insular, self-serving prejudices of those so-called "protesters" than it does about those people trying to have a quiet dinner at an eatery that the "protesters" themselves would probably never go to because they don’t like the idea of eating “Mexican” food. Can’t these people see that the “optics” look bad—at least to Hispanics, or don’t they “matter”?

“What about us” is certainly what the family of Gabriel Casso wants to know. Let’s look at shooting that have occurred so far in 2021. On April 3 in Concourse Village in New York, the Hispanic hip-hop artist who friends said was a “good” kid who minded his own business, was shot a block from where he lived. Initial reports blamed two gang members, Kejuan Delaney and Hassan Maxwell, who were randomly shooting into a crowd. Two people were killed, one of them being Casso. But the truth turned out to be quite different.

Casso, like the other bystanders, was running from the scene trying to escape the bullets. Moments earlier, three policemen in an unmarked car that just happened to be patrolling in the area responded to the sound of shooting, jumped out of their car and observed Casso running toward them. Despite the fact that the police saw the two shooters firing into the crowd, they apparently also saw Casso as a “threat” despite the fact that he was behaving in a “natural” way in order to escape getting killed. He was shot “multiple times” in the torso from the front, and follow-up reports admitted that the unarmed Casso ran right into death-by-cop. Why the police viewed him as a “threat” when he was like other people in the vicinity just trying to escape the shooters plainly shows that police assumed Casso was fair game because of his “ethnicity.” If Casso was black would this be the cause of outrage and national news? Very likely.

A few days earlier a 13-year-old boy named Adam Toledo was killed by Chicago police. He and a “friend” were apparently “playing” with a gun in an alley, which was recorded by a “Shotspotter” device. After being chased by police, a body cam showed that an officer running up to Toledo told him to drop a gun while in almost the same instant shot him in the chest. The body cam also showed that a gun was on the ground, and that Toledo was raising his empty hands in the air when he was shot. The officer hadn’t even bothered to wait to see if this kid was “complying” when he shot him; Toledo was reportedly the youngest victim of a police shooting in Chicago “in years,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

Also in Chicago, Anthony Alvarez was fatally shot by police just hours after he had stopped by his father’s home to show him his new Jeep and make plans to eat out with his two-year-old daughter that evening. The details are “sketchy” about what happened; police reportedly were involved in a foot chase with Alvarez a few blocks from his home before alleging that he “produced” a gun. The Tribune reported that police have not been forthcoming about the circumstances of the shooting, or why they were chasing him at all. Alvarez’s father wants “answers” and “justice”; tougher luck with that if you are not black or a white woman. Coming after the shooting of Toledo, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called for the CPD’s “foot chase” policy to be “overhauled.” However, Lightfoot has faced criticism for her refusal to institute the civilian oversight group she promised when first elected.

In 90 percent white Clark County in the state of Washington, for some reason the case of a black man named Jenoah Donald has received almost no attention, not even in this state. Donald was pulled over on a “routine” traffic stop by sheriff’s deputies. One of them, a female deputy named Holly Troupe, became “highly agitated” when she saw a screwdriver in the center console of Donald’s car; she claims that she “feared” that Donald might use it to “stab” another deputy, Sean Boyle. The deputies tried to “wrestle” Donald out of the car, and failing to do that, Boyle fatally shot the unarmed man. Boyle admitted that the traffic stop was entirely arbitrary and he was “unsure” if any crime had been committed to justify the pullover—which there was in fact none at all. Frankly, does this guy really look “dangerous”?:




And yet the Seattle Times has that full page photo showing justice being served in another state.

Also receiving almost no critical review is the killings of mental health patients, who should be in institutions receiving treatment, but are generally put back on the street for lack of resources. The Treatment Advocacy Center reports that although 2 percent of Americans have untreated mental health issues, they make-up 25 percent of victims of fatal police shootings.

For example, this year in New York the mother of a 17-year-old white male named Judson Albahm called police to “assist” in having him transported to a mental health clinic. Albahm had driven away in a car, but law enforcement caught up with him on a lonely road, where he was shot multiple times outside the vehicle. Law enforcement claimed that they felt “threatened” by an object they said was in his hand, but they have yet to identify what exactly that was.

In Texas a black male named Marvin Scott III, who suffered from schizophrenia, was arrested for marijuana possession; he allegedly used the drug to “self-medicate.” After being transported to a hospital for “strange behavior,” he was then sent to the county jail, where his “strange behavior” led police to pepper spray him and cover his head with a “spit hood”—which apparently caused him to suffocate to death.

A 79-year-old white male in Maryland named Leonard Popa was the subject of a “routine” mental health and welfare check by police, but was instead shot and killed by them. Popa did not respond to “requests” to enter his home, and after police forced entry into it, they allegedly encountered the lone Popa holding a gun—or at least that was their “story.”

In Pennsylvania, Ryan Shirey was in the home of his parents when he was overcome by a “heightened paranoid state” due to a “heated argument” with his ex-girlfriend, who called police. Shirey’s parents reported that Shirey became afraid and tried to hide in the basement. Police found him there, huddled with what they claimed was a gun; when he refused to “drop it” he was shot and killed. Shirey’s parents claim that he didn’t deserve a “death sentence” for his mental health issues, although why his ex-girlfriend had been allowed in their house to cause all the trouble in the first place is a question they will have to live with.

In Texas this past Friday, Marcelo Garcia, who police were “familiar” with and had successfully responded to his bouts with mental illness, this time shot him dead right in front of his shocked children, who ran up to his body screaming at police, who did not attempt medical assistance for ten minutes. The officer who shot Garcia had only been on the job for seven months, and was clearly ill-equipped to deescalate the situation as others had been able to do.

Statistica.com tells us that in 2020, of the 895 cases of police shootings of which the race of the victim was known, 50 percent were white, 27 percent were black and 19 percent Hispanic. A January 2021 Justice Department report tells us that blacks represent 12.5 percent of the population, but 33.6 percent of all violent offenses; this isn’t “justifying” anything, but those people committing those crimes are not doing people who are law-abiding any favors, and it does point to why police tend to rely on “stereotype,” which they mistake for “experience.” 

Police shootings is a problem for all of us, and an indictment of how this country deals with mental health. Cases like that George Floyd may grab headlines, but making it a “black” issue demeans all the other victims of police shootings where the use of lethal force was clearly unnecessary. If we continue to view the shootings of whites, Hispanics and the mentally-ill as less worthy of “outrage” than of black shooting victims, then that only insures that police will only be more “cautious” about who their shooting victims are—not prevent its abuse at all.

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