In March this year 15-year-old Ryan Gainer, who was autistic, was killed by police near Los Angeles when officers responded to a 911 call from a family member. According to CNN, body cam footage showed that two sheriff’s deputies shot Ryan within five seconds of seeing him. Videos captured someone in the home saying that Ryan had a stick. It turned out to be a gardening tool.
In April a young, Black Chicago man named Dexter Reed joined Ryan in the ever-growing list of Black men who are killed by police. Three days after buying a car, Dexter told his mom he was going for a ride, but he never came home. According to an ABC report at the time, Reed, 26, was shot 13 times during a traffic stop for not wearing a seatbelt. Ruled a homicide by the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, body camera video showed police firing dozens of times at Reed's vehicle while he was inside.
In June, police in Utica, NY shot and killed a 13-year-old Burmese refugee named Nyah Mway after he pointed a BB gun at officers who said that he ran from them after being stopped on the street. Body cam footage showed an officer tackling the youth to the ground and punching him. Then another officer opened fire as the two wrestled on the ground. Nyah had just graduated from middle school, the AP reported.
Of course, we all remember Tamir Rice who was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in Cleveland in November 2014, when he was shot and killed by a police officer at the age of 12. The same year Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in Missouri, was also killed by a police officer.
In her recent book, We Refuse, scholar and activist Kellie Carter Jackson writes about police brutality against Black people within a historical context. One of the stories she tells is of an event just before George Floyd was killed.
It is about a young man named Tye Anders who was accused by Texas police of running a stop sign. Terrified, he drove to his grandmother's house and cowered on her lawn. He was unarmed and had his arms outstretched when police cars arrived. Officers pointed their guns at him. This was at the time in 2020 when, as Carter Jackson put it, “nearly every week a hashtag named for a Black man or woman slain by police circulated on Twitter — Breonna Taylor, Audre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Tamir Rice. Often they were killed after a routine stop or other nonviolent encounter." Tye Anders 90-year-old grandmother threw herself on top of him. Injured, she was taken to the hospital, while her grandson was arrested and charged with fleeing from a police officer.
More recently, in July this year, the attorney general in New Jersey opened an investigation into the death of a woman who was fatally shot by an officer responding to a 911 call about a mental health crisis. Like Sonya Massey, who was also killed by a policeman after a similar call, she should still be alive.
It's stories like these that made the Black Panther Party call for "an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people" in the 1960s when it wrote their Ten Point Program and platform. Today, in 2024, we are still calling for the same thing.
Both Black/African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos are twice as likely to experience the threat or use of force during police-initiated contact, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In the U.S. during a given year, an estimated one million civilians experience those threats or use of force. Additionally, according to the Bureau, an estimated 250,000 civilian injuries are caused by law enforcement officers and more than 1000 people are killed by law enforcement in the U.S. annually. Further, the number of fatal police shootings has risen in recent years. In 2023, police killed the highest number of people on record.
Last year Mothers against Police Brutality, founded in 2013 by Kathy Scott-Lykes who lost her son in Georgia, launched We Remember, a national awareness campaign against the "relentless, ongoing devastation of police violence." Begun by ten mothers who lost their children to police brutality, their inaugural event "Say Their Names" recently launched a Billboard Observance Day in commemoration of their children. The billboards read, “They were forever silenced. Speak for them.”
After the murder of George Floyd Ben and Jerry’s made this statement: “The murder of George Floyd was the result of inhumane police brutality that is perpetuated by a culture of white supremacy. What happened to [him] was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and a culture that has treated Black bodies as the enemy from the beginning. Floyd [was] the latest in a long list of names that stretches back in time.
Kellie Carter Jackson, Black historians, writers and scholars who tell us about the history of racism in America would surely agree. We need to learn from all of them and to recognize that the time has come to end this continuing tragedy.
Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.