By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April
27, 2021
On April 18, two remarkably similar
incidents played out in different parts of the country.
In Burnsville, Minn., police got a report
that a man, 30-year-old Bradley Olsen, had been involved in a carjacking. They
pursued the vehicle Olsen was driving, he fired at them, and they returned
fire, hitting and
killing him.
In Fort Worth on the same day, police also
responded to reports of a man trying to steal cars. The armed man fled on foot,
and an officer told him to drop his weapon. As the officer pursued, 31-year-old
Ryan Williams pointed his gun at the cop and fired a shot. The officer returned fire
and killed him.
The difference between these two incidents
was that Bradley Olsen was white, and Ryan Williams was black. Otherwise, the
cases are largely indistinguishable — how they started, how they played out,
and, emphatically, how they ended.
This is the overall sense that one gets
from the Washington
Post’s famous database of
police-involved shootings. Reading through it, there is no stark racial
difference that jumps out, rather a dreary sameness. The fact patterns that get
people shot by the cops, whether they are white, black, or Hispanic, are
largely the same.
There are the most extreme cases, when
suspects engage in gun battles with cops. But pointing a gun, including a fake
gun, at an officer also is likely to end badly. So is approaching a cop with a
knife or even a metal pipe and refusing, despite repeated orders, to put it
down. Resisting arrest is a common theme and, quite often, the people killed by
the police were obviously mentally disturbed.
The Washington Post database
suggests we have a violence problem in America and certainly a mental-health
problem, but not — at least not on the face of it — a race problem.
Consider just the police-involved killings
over the last month. Almost every type of incident has involved people of
different races.
In Escondido, Calif., on April 21, police
responded to a call about a white male hitting cars with a metal object. When
the suspect, a mentally disturbed man with a long rap sheet, approached a
police officer wielding a two-foot metal pry tool, and ignored repeated orders
to drop the object and use-of-force warnings, he was shot
and killed.
In Rockford, Ill., on April 10, police
responded to a domestic-violence call from the wife of Faustin Guetigo. When
Guetigo emerged from the basement with a metal
pipe and reportedly knocked an officer
unconscious, police shot
and killed him. Guetigo, 27, was an immigrant from the
Central African Republic.
Fake guns are a common element in
police-involved shootings. In Leonardtown, Md., on April 13, a state
trooper shot and
killed Peyton Ham, a 16-year-old white male, after he
pointed what turned out to be an airsoft gun at him. According to an
eyewitness, after he got shot, Ham brandished a knife and tried to stand up,
defying orders to drop the knife, and the officer fired again.
In Hawaii on April 5, police shot
and killed Iremamber Sykap, a 16-year-old born
in Guam, after pursuing a vehicle connected to a number of crimes and seeing
what they believed was a firearm in that car. It turned out to be a replica gun.
Knives also make regular appearances,
typically involving individuals with mental-health issues. In North Lauderdale
on April 15, police shot
and killed Jeffrey Guy Sacks, a 26-year-old
white man, when he entered a store with a knife and, after officers arrived,
ran at one of them with the knife despite warnings to stop. According to his
family, Sacks was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.
In Harris County, Texas, on April 14,
police responded to a call about a man experiencing a mental-health crisis. He
had a knife, approached officers, and reportedly refused to drop it. An officer
attempted to Tase him and then shot and
killed Marcelo Garcia, a 46-year-old
Hispanic man. Family members reportedly said he suffered from schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder.
In San Marcos, Texas, in April, police
responded to reports of a man walking in traffic. They tried unsuccessfully to
detain him and, when he charged them with a knife, shot and
killed Rescue Eram, a 31-year-old man from Micronesia.
Critics of the police argued last week
that the shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, apparently in the act of stabbing another
girl, showed how police treat blacks differently. But the fatal shooting in
Oneonta, N.Y., on April 6 of Tyler Green, a 23-year-old white man, puts the lie
to this.
Involved in a domestic dispute in the
front yard of a house, Green lunged with a
knife at his girlfriend and
a small child when the police arrived. As in the Ma’Khia Bryant case, it all
unfolded very quickly. Green fell down, and an officer tried to kick the knife
away from him. But as he held it and grabbed for the child from the ground,
ignoring orders to drop the knife, the police shot
him in the back and killed him.
Here is the video.
One of the starkest disparities in
police-involved shootings concerns how much attention is devoted to cases
depending on the race of the person shot. Of course, police sometimes get it
wrong in how they handle cases involving white people, too, but there is no
activist and media apparatus devoted to finding and blowing up such cases, in
part because it would run counter to the narrative of systemically racist
police preying on black people.
The George Floyd video was awful to watch.
But so is the video of the 2016 death of Tony Timpa in the custody of Dallas
police officers. John McWhorter highlighted this case in a piece about
police shootings and Byron York noted it in
his Twitter feed. The Dallas Morning News wrote this report last year when it finally obtained the body-camera footage of the incident.
Suffering from mental-health problems,
Timpa himself called the cops. He was unarmed but struggled when handcuffed
behind his back. Police pinned him to the ground face down. He repeatedly said
they were killing him, but the police didn’t realize he was having trouble
breathing and, in fact, dying. When he stopped breathing, the police joked
about him being asleep, and the cops and paramedics were slow to try to render
life-saving aid.
It is the cherry-picking of
officer-involved shootings and other incidents that makes it possible for the likes of
Jim Acosta of CNN to casually refer to “a rash” of
police killings of African Americans. This is a statement that shows a profound
ignorance of the true landscape of officer-involved shootings, but is, sad to
say, utterly characteristic of most of the commentary and activism around
policing in America.
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