The Cops Shoot People of Different Races for the Same Reasons

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.