Staying-home-while-black
by Tom Sullivan
Body cam footage shows mentally ill Jason Harrison walking out his door holding a screwdriver moments before being shot and killed by Dallas police, 2014.
“This is a serious question: What can a black person do to keep from getting killed by police in this country?” Eugene Robinson asks this morning in the Washington Post.
It is as if black people are in season and for police that season runs year-round.
Quick backstory from Vox:
At around 2 am local time on October 12, a neighbor of 28-year-old Atatiana Koquice Jefferson called a non-emergency hotline, saying he was concerned about an open door at the woman’s residence and wanted to make sure she was okay. According to a statement released by the Fort Worth Police Department, officers arrived at the home at around 2:25 am to respond to an “open structure call” and, after seeing the open door, walked around the perimeter of the residence.
The department said that while doing so, officers saw a person inside standing near a window. “Perceiving a threat the officer drew his duty weapon and fired one shot striking the person inside the residence,” police said.
Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was in her bedroom playing a video game with her 8-year-old nephew. The officer who shot through her window resigned from the force hours before he was to be fired. Aaron Dean, 34, has been charged with murder. Footage here.
Victim Atatiana Jefferson, 28 (Family photo provided to NBC5)
Jefferson’s sisters and brother tell the Dallas Morning News they see the arrest as progress since police are slow to indict cops.
“That’s a huge step for us,” Jefferson’s brother, Adarius Carr, told reporters. “They are willing to understand this is serious and we mean it. Justice is important to us.”
The shooting comes just two weeks after a jury convicted former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger for shooting and killing her neighbor Botham Jean. She entered his apartment by mistake, thinking it was her own, and shot him on his couch.
In both cases, the officers were white and the victims black.
Body camera footage shows an officer looking through a window by the light of a flashlight. He shouts, “Put your hands up — show me your hands,” and fires seconds later, never identifying himself as an officer.
A black person might be killed by police in this country for driving-while-black, running-away-while-black, walking-while-black, or even for standing-while-black, Robinson charges, citing the cases of Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.
Add staying-at-home-while black to that list. These scenarios are characteristic of racism but have “less to do with the color of the perpetrators than that of the victims,” Robinson writes, “In too many departments, officers still are being enculturated to see persons of color as both threatening and disposable.”
Enculturated is a good word for it. I’ve been writing about that problem in this space for at least four years. Dallas police shot and killed Jason Harrison, a mentally ill black man, after he walked out his door holding a screwdriver in 2014.
Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning News commented at the time about something he’d heard from multiple police officers: “The No. 1 duty of a police officer is to go home to his or her family at the end of the shift,” writing:
If so, then an officer is always right to shoot in any dangerous encounter. Or potentially dangerous. Or conceivably dangerous. Or most any time.
If self-preservation is the first and foremost priority of a police officer, then you get what we have seen in recent months and years — a series of unsettling police shootings.
You get what we saw on that video released last week showing Dallas police shooting a mentally ill man nonchalantly holding a screwdriver in his hands.
You get the questions swirling around the shooting death last month of an unarmed man said to be approaching a Grapevine officer with his hands raised.
It would explain other such shootings in situations that seemed to pose no immediate threat to officers.
Maybe it’s time to quit nodding along and question the maxim that going home at the end of the day trumps all other considerations.
The No. 1 duty of a police officer is to be sure citizens are safe at the beginning and end of their shifts and inside their own homes. But that’s not what warrior cops learn formally and informally. It’s a training issue.
But it’s not only a training issue. Robinson continues:
It will not do to write this off as just a horrible mistake — not when such mistakes fit such a clear pattern. Far too often, officers approach situations involving African Americans with racist assumptions. They see a deadly threat where none exists. They act in ways that escalate the situation rather than calm it down. They are too quick to draw their weapons and too quick to fire. They shoot first and ask questions later.
Racist attitudes lead to tragic outcomes. Until departments banish those attitudes, until officers’ default assumption is that black Americans are not suspects but citizens, more innocents like Atatiana Jefferson will die.
While knocking doors once for a local candidate, the first thing I saw when one door opened was a hand holding a small kitchen knife. I stepped back. The friendly woman holding it had been cutting vegetables in her kitchen. Had she been black and I a white police officer, I might have shot her then and there and walked away uncharged.