This January, Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old graduate student from India, was tragically killed when a Seattle police officer struck her with his police SUV while responding to an emergency call. A police investigation of the incident later determined that the officer, Kevin Dave, was driving at a top speed of 74mph and was not using his siren continuously, while barreling down Seattle’s streets, but only “chirping” his siren at intersections. At the moment when he hit Kandula, the investigation concluded, Dave was hurtling at a speed of 63mph; Kandula “was thrown approximately 138ft” by the impact. His speed, the report established, was the main reason for the collision. Kandula was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
As terrible as the wrenching loss of this young woman is, the Seattle police department has made it worse. Officer Daniel Auderer, the vice-president of the Seattle police officers’ guild (the police union), was dispatched as part of his regular duties to see if Officer Dave had been impaired at the time of the incident. After completing a routine assessment of Dave at a local precinct, Auderer drove off in his police cruiser and called Mike Sloan, the union president, on the phone. Two minutes of the call, from Auderer’s side only (we don’t hear Sloan), were accidentally recorded by Auderer’s body camera before he turned it off. Just this week, that recording has come to light.
A whole lot is revealed in those two minutes. We hear Auderer say: “I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then, when he hit the brakes, flew off the car. But she is dead.” And then he laughs. You read that right. He laughs. And this was no uncomfortable chuckle. This was a hearty laugh from the back of the throat. In what universe is this young woman’s devastating death even remotely funny?
“No, it’s a regular person,” he says next. Followed by: “Just write a check.” Then Auderer laughs again, and again heartily, before continuing. “Eleven thousand dollars”, he says. “She was 26, anyway. She had limited value.”
Auderer has stated that he “believed this conversation was private and not being recorded” – as if that makes things better? – and was not being “insensitive”, his word, but was “imitating what a lawyer tasked with negotiating the case would be saying”. But not everyone believes him. The Seattle Community Police Commission, an official watchdog group, called his comments “heartbreaking and shockingly insensitive” and stated that they reveal “a callous dismissiveness toward police accountability systems that are at the heart of the city’s efforts to reform the Seattle police department”.
Auderer’s comments are profoundly disturbing not because they are outrageous – it would take some kind of monstrous denial to believe they weren’t – but because they confirm that very suspicion that we are confronted with every day in this country but are routinely told to ignore. In fact, we are ridiculed, disregarded and berated every day when we point out that police departments around the country too often fail to preserve our lives, as they are sworn to do, but are instead deeply invested in protecting their own livelihoods.
In the last 12 months, 968 people have been shot and killed by the police around the country, with Black Americans killed at more than twice the rate of white Americans and Latinos killed by police also at disproportionate rates. How many times did police officers laugh at those deaths or consider their victims to be of “limited value”?
While the death of Jaahnavi Kandula was not due to a police shooting, the facts of her death still point to the same questions. When Officer Auderer says “it’s a regular person”, what does he even mean? And when he says she “had limited value”, we see the crux – and the inhumanity – of the problem. It begins to feel like modern US policing is less about ensuring public safety and more about endowing the police and the entire criminal legal system with the authority to determine how much each of us is worth, blithely stated in a dollar figure, rounded down.
This is grotesque, and it ought to infuriate every person in this country whose safety is supposedly guaranteed by the police. But this particular situation may call for mourning before anger. I can’t imagine the pain of being a member of Kandula’s family right now. The dean of her campus also remembered her as “a stellar student and a delightful and effervescent human being”. He said she was adored for “her bubbly laugh, sense of humor and infectious personality”.
Kandula had been working toward her master’s degree in information systems so she could support her mother in India, reports indicate. But instead, it was her uncle in Texas who had to make the arrangements to send her body to her mother. The same uncle, Ashok Mandula, told the Seattle Times: “I wonder if these men’s daughters or granddaughters have value. A life is a life.”
A life is a life. It’s not $11,000. It’s not limited value. It is that simple, and it is that heartbreaking. But after our sorrow must come our rage, because how else will things change?
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
