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| Philando Castile |
Tuesday morning in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officers responded to a 911 call from a homeless man alleging a man had threatened him with a gun near a corner store. The police responded to the call and found Alton Sterling hawking CDs in front of the neighborhood grocery store. Few minutes after the two cops arrived at the scene, they tackled Sterling to the ground, and one of the officers fatally shot him severally in the chest point blank as he was restrained his hands behind his back.
Tuesday morning in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officers responded to a 911 call from a homeless man alleging a man had threatened him with a gun near a corner store. The police responded to the call and found Alton Sterling hawking CDs in front of the neighborhood grocery store.
Few minutes after the two cops arrived at the scene, they tackled Sterling to the ground, and one of the officers fatally shot him severally in the chest point blank as he was restrained his hands behind his back.
24 hours after Sterling’s assassination, Philando Castile, a St. Paul Minnesota resident was shot and killed during a traffic stop over a “broken tail light”. His four-year-old daughter was sitting at the back of the car while his girlfriend and mother of his daughter was at the passenger side of the vehicle, live streaming the cold-blooded murder of his boyfriend and daughter’s dad by a trigger happy white Minnesota police officer. His bloody killing went viral as it happened.
Inside a park on a cold midday afternoon of November 22, 2014, in Cleveland, Ohio, a twelve-year-old boy pulled his toy airsoft gun to play in the breezy weather, he walked playfully, along the park alley, pointing his fake toy gun at passers-by. A wary park visitor was scared the child may be carrying a deadly weapon at a public park, called the Police to report that a child was "pulling a gun in and out of his pants and pointing it at people." The caller, after noticing that the gun the child was carrying was a toy gun, called back the 911 operator to update that: ”I think he is carrying a toy gun”. It was too late. Police had been sent to the park. The Police dispatched its patrolmen on duty. A few minutes later, the team arrived at the park where the black child was innocently mesmerizing park goers with his holstered toy gun. Two seconds after the officers arrived, one of the responding officers, Timothy Loehmann, pulled his gun, and pulled the trigger and fired a shot at the child. The child fell on the dirt ground: his 14-year-old sister that had accompanied him to the park to play, rushed towards the fallen brother, but Police restrained her. Police handcuffed the fourteen-year-old sister who was running to help her brother they just shot. She would watch her brother struggle to stay alive as Police stood beside the dying child, a child they just blasted waiting for the Ambulance to arrive. Several minutes later, an ambulance arrived the scene and rushed Tamir Rice to the hospital emergency room for treatment. The African-American child died the next morning.
Cameroonian immigrant, Charly “Africa” Leundeu Keunang was convicted in 2000 of bank robbery. Three years into his 15-year sentence, he was transferred to a prison psychiatric hospital due to mental illness and subsequently released into the streets of Los Angeles. He became destitute and homeless, pitching his tent along busy streets in Los Angeles. March 1st, passersby reported a fight along the sidewalks of the busy street involving Keunang. Five officers responded to the call. The officers approached Keunang and a fight ensued. He was fatally shot during a struggle with the police. The fatal altercation that resulted in the death of an unarmed homeless black man in the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department attracted major protests from blacks in the vicinity of the incident, and also around the Los Angeles police department yard.
Mariam Carey was a 34-year-old single mother who lived in the nation’s capital, Washington D.C. On October 3, 2013, Ms. Carey was driving along Pennsylvania Avenue when she suddenly realized that she might be traveling on the wrong side of the street. She drove into a White House road block, panicked, with her child strapped in the back seat, she quickly attempted a U-turn: While negotiating a U-turn, she allegedly hit a barricade and a Secret Service in front of the White House. A speed chase ensued between her and Secret Service agents; the police surrounded and cornered her, then shot her five times. She died on the spot. She was unarmed. Her daughter was sitting in the back seat. The US Attorney’s office refused to press charges against the Secret Service agents involved in her killing.
These cases are part of the more than “1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2014 captured by US federal government data.” Blacks between the ages 15 and 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of the police.
Within the past ten years, white police officers targeted blacks in shootings that result in deaths and injuries at the ratio of two blacks per week. These statistics are contained in the most recent accounts of “justifiable homicide by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. “On average, there were 96 such incidents among at least 400 police killings each year that were reported to the FBI by local police.”
The numbers of Police killings of unarmed Black Americans seem to have increased within the past year. Sadly, in most of the shootings, police officers involved are absolved by the US legal system, this leave families of those affected to mourn the death of their innocent child or children caught in what is now regarded as a polarized racial killing of blacks by mostly overzealous, trigger happy white police officers.
Since 2014 summer killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, one of the most celebrated cases and unrests of summer 2014 in the United States, several police-related murders have been reported involving white officers shooting to kill black people. Another major case was that of a New Yorker, Eric Gardner, who was choked to death while police were attempting to restrain him. Officers in these sadistic killings have either been suspended or reduced to desk duties or as in the case of Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Brown in Ferguson and the New York Police officer that choked Gardner to death, not indicted.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its recent data compilation concluded that black people or persons of color are most likely to be killed by cops. The stories of cops versus blacks are same in most hometowns in America these days.
The news trend on television screens and social media today were mostly about reports of police shooting mostly black unarmed civilians.
The case of Rumaim Brisbon, an Arizona native shed even more dangerous light into police rush to self-defense- "a shoot now and ask questions later mentality."
Earlier last year, someone reported a drug deal in the neighborhood where Brisbon resided. Police approached his vehicle, screamed at him to raise his hands in the air as police approached his vehicle. Brisbon got off his vehicle. He suddenly began running from the scene towards the street. Police pursued on foot, pulling weapons and pointing toward Brisbon. As Brisbon reached his pocket during the chase to remove the bottle of pills in his pocket and discard them, police shot him. The officer later explained that he had fired a shot because he thought Brisbon had a gun. The gun was a bottle of pills. He died instantly.
Keith Vidal was an 18-year-old schizophrenic living in Southport, North Carolina. He was in the middle of an attack when neighbors noticed his sudden changed conditions and called the Police. When Police pulled into his home, it found Keith engaged in a schizophrenic episode, carrying a screwdriver. Two officers that came as first respondents approached calmly and tried to calm him down. A third officer suddenly walked into the scene, tasered and fatally shot the teenager, stating that “We don’t have time for this shit”, before killing the mentally ill teenager.
BY AZUKA JEBOSE
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