Our view: Police shootings aren’t just a ‘local matter’
In the space of 10 days, two more unarmed black men died at the hands of police — one in Sacramento, another in Houston — and two Baton Rouge police officers escaped being charged in the 2016 shooting death of another black man. The incidents have revived outrage over a festering issue: the disproportionate number of unarmed black men killed by police.
Earlier shootings energized the Black Lives Matter movement. President Obama and his Justice Department helped defuse tensions by investigating some of the shootings and finding systemic racial bias in city police departments. And for a time, Americans sat up and paid attention.
But promises made back then have mostly fallen by the wayside. And it is as tragic as it is inexcusable that so little has changed.
Stephon Clark was buried Thursday in Sacramento, 11 days after he was killed by city police who pursued him after reports of a man vandalizing vehicles in Clark’s neighborhood. Within seconds of shouting, “Show me your hands. Gun! Gun! Gun!” two officers fired 20 shots. Only there was no gun — just a cellphone found by the body of the father of two, who was killed in his grandmother’s backyard.
Timothy Davis, president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association, asserted that “the shooting was legally justified” and that Clark “took a shooting stance and pointed an object at the police officers.” Actually, the shooting is still under investigation, and no conclusions have been reached. One of the officers commented minutes after the shooting that Clark “kind of approached us hands out and then fell down.” Nothing about a “shooting stance.” Another question: Why did body cam audio go mute minutes after the shooting?
Clark’s death is no singular event. Days later in Houston, another unarmed black man, who’d been standing in a busy intersection with his pants down, was shot by an officer. No body cam this time. But the man’s family reported that he’d been depressed since his two children drowned.
This year already, 263 people have been fatally shot by police nationally. That’s about three per day and on track to repeat the death toll — nearly 1,000 annually — in recent years, according to a Washington Post database, which doesn’t attempt to distinguish between justified and unjustified shootings.
Even for those viewed as unjustified, few police officers are ever held accountable. Since 2005, just 85 officers have been charged with a crime. Less than 40% have been convicted, some on lesser charges.
News organizations are far ahead of the government in tracking this important issue. The federal government can tell you that 72 “non-juvenile spotted owls” were identified in a 2016 survey. But the FBI can’t say how many people died at the hands of police.
Despite community and national outrage, President Trump’s spokeswoman said Wednesday that such shootings are a “local matter.”
They are anything but. Such shootings taint honorable police officers and put them in more danger. More broadly, civil rights are a national matter. If minorities are being killed disproportionately, the government has a duty to help end this scourge.