5 Shootings of Unarmed African American Men by Police in August So Far. Why?
4 days ago | by Joe Williams- Armand Bennet, 26, was shot three times in the head when a police officer saw him driving through an upscale New Orleans neighborhood.
- In Los Angeles police stopped Ezell Ford, 26, for the catch-all description of suspicious behavior; the mentally-disabled man was shot three times during a confrontation.
- Police in Beavercreek, Ohio, shot and killed John Crawford inside a Walmart last week. His crime: holding a toy pistol he’d picked up in the store.
- And in Tulsa last week, an off-duty officer – a trainer at the city’s police academy – shot and killed Jeremy Lake, 19, as he walked down the street with the officer’s daughter.
 Those are just from August – and only the ones we know about. All of them were African American men, all of them were unarmed, and all of them were shot and killed by police under murky circumstances.
If nothing else, the death of Michael Brown, whom an officer shot and killed in the mean streets of Ferguson, Missouri, has put the issue lethal police force against African American men on the national agenda. But it only got there because people felt so angry and so frustrated by a deadly example of their disempowerment that they refused to be ignored.
I have to stop at this point and say I abhor rioting; it can be self-destructive in certain communities, counterproductive and can damage innocent people as well as property. As a cop reporter, I’ve covered minor rioting, and it’s scary as well as chaotic. However, whenever I hear people like Joe Scarborough and Bill O’Reilly whitesplain how black men should conduct themselves around police – Just cooperate! They won’t bother you if you do what they say! – it makes me want to throw a garbage can through a plate-glass window.
 Consider: in 2007, the web site Colorlines tried to quantify how many black men were shot and killed by police in major metropolitan areas, but found that few police departments or criminal statisticians kept track. Their conclusion: in 10 major cities with populations of 1 million or more, black males were a disproportionately high number of victims of police shootings, particularly in New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas.
Consider: if it weren’t for the attention brought to Brown’s death, we wouldn’t know about Bennet, a man who has had his scrapes with the law but probably didn’t deserve to die. Or Ford, whom police suspected was in a gang but who had been disabled, on the streets, for years. Crawford’s death is so bizarre – A toy gun?? Really?? Aren’t they made of brightly-colored plastic to avoid this kind of mistake?? - that it almost seems like cruel fiction.
And consider: In Tulsa, the death of Lake screams police racism so loudly it’s hard to hear over the din. The officer, Shannon Kepler, is white – responsible for training rookie cops at the city’s police academy – shot at Lake as he walked down the street with his daughter, then he fired at Lake’s brother, grazing him. Kepler and his wife – also a white Tulsa cop – had kicked their daughter out of their home for “poor life choices,” and Lake, a volunteer at the homeless shelter where she turned up, befriended her. After the shooting, Kepler’s wife Gina tried to help him cover it up; she has been charged as an accomplice to Lake’s murder. Kepler has been charged with first-degree murder. 
Yet none of those incidents of police shooting of black men – two of which happened after Brown was gunned down in Ferguson – made national headlines, or drew national reporters, or compelled the president to make a statement. And Ferguson only struck a chord when police rolled in with tanks and snipers, upping the ante with protesters and practically inviting riots.
But the silent epidemic shows no sign of abating, giving ominous weight to what Delores Jones-Brown, interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York, told Colorlines in 2007: “There is a crisis of perception where African American males and females take their lives in their hands just walking out the door.” |
