Patrick Lyoya, Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Jacob Blake, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Akai Gurley.
A drop in the ocean of victims of an American policing policy that amounts to ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ when it comes to Black people.
Scratch the surface and you’ll find a litany of cases over the past few years alone that could have so easily been handled with patience and compassion – as it should be – yet so often have resulted in death and the destruction of families and communities.
Hill and Clark, for example, were shot because police somehow mistook the mobile phones they were holding for weapons. Blake was shot in the back multiple times at close range as he tried to enter his car.
Read the detail around enough of these cases and you begin to get the picture. Contrast all that with Kyle Rittenhouse, Robert Aaron Long, Benjamin Murdy, Brian Riley, Floyd Ray Roseberry, Jeffrey Nicholas and the weekend’s alleged Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron.
All white, and all reminders of the fact it is actually possible to apprehend a suspect in the most volatile of circumstances without loss of life.
Gendron’s rampage took a total of 13 lives – 11 of them Black, as he’d intended – in and outside a supermarket.
He’d been wearing metal armour, he was holding an assault rifle and had threatened to kill himself. Police took him alive. Rittenhouse was armed with a semi-automatic, AR-15 style rifle. He’d fatally shot two men and wounded another in August 2020.
On the night of the carnage he walked towards police with his hands up and the rifle actually strapped across his chest.
Officers repeatedly told him to get out of the road.
When he continued to advance, one officer attempted to, er, pepper-spray him. The officers later argued “there was nothing to suggest this individual was involved in any criminal behaviour”.
For the avoidance of any doubt, I’m not suggesting officers should have killed Rittenhouse and Gendron as they did with their many Black suspects.
This is a column wishing for officers NOT to shoot those Black suspects, just as they don’t kill the white ones.
It’s a column praying police will eventually show the same restraint, the same composure and the same capability of holding their fire while they establish the facts.
What’s it to me? Very often I wonder whether – if I ever visited America – I could end up as a statistic.
Whether I could fall victim to a trigger happy menace with a badge who sees a 6ft 3in Black man as a threat first and a human being later.
I’d hope and pray not.
But for so many men and women just like me it is a reality. In a country where parents replace The Talk about the Birds and the Bees with The Talk about How To Comply With Police it is frightening to think that in many cases, even complicity is not enough.
