"Do you have a gun?" Week 17 police killings
The first in a weekly feature at Where Do We Go From Here: A round up police shootings for the 17th week of this year.
“Yup,” he answered to the dispatcher when asked if he had a gun. “Nope,” he told her when she asked if he had a weapon on him.
Isiah Brown was holding a cordless house phone when he was shot 10 times by an officer who had previously given him a ride home that night. The cop apparently thought the phone was a gun and Brown was holding it to his own head, so the officer decided to shoot Brown to prevent him from killing himself (not sure how that helps). The Brown shooting in Virginia last week appears to be borne of terrible communication between the dispatcher and the officer on scene. Any reasonable person who listens to the 911 audio would conclude that Brown’s threats are pretty empty. But that’s the difference between having encountered unstable people on the streets as a civilian living in urban areas and being a member of law enforcement who are often policing areas where they don’t live. (It’s not clear if that’s the case in the Brown shooting, but the issue of suburban whites policing black and brown neighborhoods pervades American law enforcement.)
Anyone who’s run into some crazy on the street corner would hear in Brown’s voice not an actual threat to someone’s life, but a mildly pissed-off guy running his mouth. Now he’s on a breathing tube because the dispatcher took everything he said literally, didn’t have the critical thinking skills to realize he was on a cordless house phone, and even if she did conclude that apparently didn’t relay that information to the officer. It’s also not clear whether she told the cop Brown said he was unarmed.
Hopefully Brown lives, but if he doesn’t he’ll join the 1,000 or so people killed each year by American law enforcement. Increasingly, those deaths are being captured on body-worn camera (BWC) or dashcam footage or, infamously in the case of George Floyd, by bystanders with smartphones. This increase in documentation will likely expose more unjustified killings by police; it will also help to decrease speculation and the spread of misinformation, as was the case with Ma’Khia Bryant, who was lunging with a knife in her hand at another young girl she was in a fight with last week in Columbus, Ohio. That truth was not apparent for the first 24 hours following the shooting, when the simple fact that a white cop shot a black teenager went viral under the assumption that the shooting was completely unjustified. It wasn’t.
These are the complexities of police use of force in the United States, and these are just two cases in the last week. While there have been successful efforts to document police killings since the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014, they exist mostly as a research resource for digging into individual cases. Following the initial coverage of your average killing, local news outlets follow up only in the most extreme of cases. But there is a very real possibility that hundreds of killings a year are unjustified and go undiscovered because police never release BWC or dash footage as reporters forget about the cases or fail to file public records requests to obtain them.
Longtime readers of Where Do We Go From Here might recall that I’ve occasionally dug into this issue, as was the case with the extremely violent — but justified — killing of Jaquavion Slayton in 2019. But most of my work on police killings has gone to national and international publications in the wake of the events themselves. Since Ferguson, I have covered untold police killings nationwide only to watch the issue subside as the chaos and madness of the Trump administration took hold. Following his removal from office and the suffocation of the news cycle due to the coronavirus, the issue of police killings came roaring back. Now, it feels like I’ve gone back in time to the two years after Ferguson when it seemed that every week a new, unjustified or questionable killing was the daylong subject of cable news.
My interest in this issue has never waned, but I now realize that, while there are good and reliable databases of police killings, no one is really doing the work of analyzing whether they were justified or not. As part of a new weekly commitment to the issue, I’ll occasionally delve into individual cases here, file public records requests to obtain previously unreleased footage, and generally try to determine how many of the 1,000 killings a year were right or wrong. But first, I’ll begin by simply providing a weekly list of police killings based on initial media reports, going back seven days from the date of these posts. To reduce the burden of volume of these lists, I’ll only include incidents in which a person was declared dead at the scene, and not those in which someone succumbs to their injuries later.
Wednesday
Ofc. Chad Moore of the Escondido (California) Police Department killed 59-year-old Steven John Olson while Olson was allegedly wielding a metal tool and refusing to drop it. BWC exists and the Department has said it will release the footage later this week.
Friday
Edward Robbesom, 52, was killed by officers with the Casa Grande (Arizona) Police Department after allegedly shooting a woman at his home and while refusing to drop a handgun. No mention of BWC footage.
SWAT team members with multiple agencies in Billings, Montana killed a still-unidentified man after he allegedly shot at the officers following a lengthy chase and standoff. None of the SWAT members had body cameras on, a troubling and common practice among agencies nationwide.
Officers in Rosenberg, Texas killed Tory Casey, 41, after he allegedly refused to drop a handgun outside a washateria (laundromat). Several witnesses said they heard gunshots prior to the officers firing, indicating Casey may have been shooting at someone. No mention of BWC footage.
Saturday
Ofc. Christopher Royer of the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department shot and killed Marvin A. Viega, 33, as Viega ran toward Royer wielding two butcher knives following a traffic stop. Viega was wanted for a 2020 murder in Massachusetts, according to police. NMPD released Royer’s BWC footage which shows the officer had no choice. This shooting is justified.
Officers with the Webbers Falls Police (Oklahoma) Department shot and killed 29-year-old Benjamin Ridley while attempting to arrest him on outstanding warrants. Police claim Ridley was armed with a gun. No media reports mention whether there is any BWC or dashcam footage of the killing.
LAPD officers shot a man wearing body armor who slammed his vehicle into a squad in what the LA Times described as a “bizarre” incident. The man, still unidentified, had his hand behind his back and was counting down “3, 2, 1” as he approached officers and began to move his hand forward. BWC footage of the killing does exist and police have not said whether they recovered a weapon.
Today
LAPD officers shot and killed an alleged murder suspect following a chase early Tuesday morning. The man’s identity and any information on BWC footage has not been released.
The photo on this post is mine from the second or third night after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson. The man in the photograph is likely my friend and freelance photographer Alex Wroblewski.