Police Have Not Released Video
Clark said the absence of a compelling video or a history of brutality complaints involving the Seneca Police Department, not Hammond’s race, was the main reason the story has remained low-profile.
Although the lack of attention paid by the mainstream media and on social media has caused some to suggest Hammonds case would have received more attention if he were black, researchers in the social justice field believe the story is not being ignored, but rather is spreading slowly.
The thing that Im hearing from people is not just a narrative of racial justice. It is accountability for police forces. It is transparency. It is understanding how communities are being policed and what the average citizen has a right to do, or not to do, in those interactions, Clark said. In that case, Hammond fits right in. Itll just be a matter of time, but we havent heard of prior complaints about the police force where he was.
The Hammond family’s attorney, Eric Bland, expressed frustration about the lack of national media attention. “An unarmed white teenager whose life is wrongfully taken at the hands of overzealous police is the same and equal to an unarmed black teenager whose life is wrongfully taken at the hands of overzealous police,” he said. “Thats very, very disturbing to us.
Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People In Us More Than 3 Times As High As In Whites
Overall fatal shooting rate not budged in 5 years public health emergency say researchers
The rate of fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people in the US is more than 3 times as high as it is among White people, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
And the total numbers of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour killed in police shootings hasnt budged over the past 5 years, prompting the researchers to describe the figures as a public health emergency.”
Deaths caused by police violence in the US are disproportionately high among BIPOC, but its not clear if the rate of these deaths might have changed over time.
The researchers therefore looked at trends in fatal police shootings, overall, and according to whether the victim was armed, to quantify years of life lost across racial/ethnic groups between 2015 and 2020.
They drew on publicly available data compiled by The Washington Post on every person killed by on-duty police officers in the US during this period.
The data, which were sourced from local news reports, independent databases, and additional reporting at the paper, include details of the race, age and sex of the victims, as well any item in their possession perceived to be a weapon.
Estimates of years of life lost were based on national historical life expectancy data for US citizens in the victims birth year compared with their actual age at death.
What Led Up To Hammonds Death
On July 26, Hammond was driving through the back parking lot of a Hardee’s fast-foot restaurant in Seneca, which sits 40 miles from Greenville near the North Carolina border, when he was stopped by two police officers as part of a drug sting.
The officers were targeting Hammond’s passenger, a 23-year-old woman.
Bland said Hammond slowed the car and reached to the floor, where his car’s gear shift was located, in order to put the vehicle in park. At that point, Bland said, someone shouted that Hammond had a gun.
It is not clear who shouted. But the uniformed police officer at the scene, who has not been identified, shot Hammond twice.
Oconee County Coroner Karl Addis told the Los Angeles Times that Hammond died of a fatal gunshot wound to the chest. He was also shot once in the collarbone area, according to Addis.
Calls to the Seneca Police Department seeking comment were not immediately returned. According to the Associated Press, Police Chief John Covington said last week that the officer was acting in self-defense because Hammond drove his car toward him.
Bland said Hammond did not have a weapon or any drugs, though police did seize a small amount of marijuana and drug paraphernalia from his passenger.
The case is also being reviewed by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division.
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Germonta Wallace: The First
Germonta Wallace, 30, was shot and killed by police on Jan. 4, 2016. Wallace was on the run from police after being named a suspect in the killing of Norris Martin, whose body was found in the trunk of a burning car. Wallace had reportedly gotten out of prison a few months prior and was working with a janitorial service.
According to the Charlotte Observer, Wallace died after a lengthy gunfight with eight Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers. His aunt, Deborah Wallace, said to reporters regarding how the fight between her nephew and police started: âI actually donât know how it went down. We donât know who was doing the shooting. We donât know if it was police or who.â The officers involved in the shooting did not face charges.
Nationwide Police Shot And Killed Nearly 1000 People In 2017
For the third year in a row, police nationwide shot and killed nearly 1,000 people, a grim annual tally that has persisted despite widespread public scrutiny of officers use of fatal force.
Police fatally shot 987 people last year, or two dozen more than they killed in 2016, according to an ongoing Washington Post database project that tracks the fatal shootings. Since 2015, The Post has logged the details of 2,945 shooting deaths, culled from local news coverage, public records and social-media reports.
While many of the year-to-year patterns remain consistent, the number of unarmed black males killed in 2017 declined from two years ago. Last year, police killed 19, a figure tracking closely with the 17 killed in 2016. In 2015, police shot and killed 36 unarmed black males.
Experts said they are uncertain why the annual total shows little fluctuation the number for 2017 is almost identical to the 995 killed by police in 2015.
Some believe the tally may correspond to the number of times police encounter people, an outcome of statistical probability. Other experts are exploring whether the number tracks with overall violence in American society.
The attention may have helped police reduce the number of unarmed people shot and killed each year, according to interviews with experts and police departments. Officers fatally shot 94 unarmed people in 2015, but that number has been lower in the past two years, with 51 killed in 2016 and 68 in 2017.
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Trying To Transform Reform And Reimagine Policing In California
Mike Gipson views the issue from two perspectives: as a former police officer in Maywood, California, and now as a longtime state Assembly member. From both sides, Gipson said, he has been bothered.
It was troubling back in 1992, when I wore a police uniform and we viewed a videotape of motorist Rodney King and the abuse this man went through, Gipson said. It was a slap in our face, the Black community, when those officers were acquitted. I was horrified then and Im horrified now when individuals lives are taken at the hands of police. It doesnt have to happen at the rate it is.
Now ,as a policymaker, Gipson is trying to transform, reform and re-imagine policing in California, including holding bad police officers accountable and putting policies in place that remove them from the profession I once loved, he said.
Mac said the origins of policing are from the era of slavery, when slave patrols monitored enslaved Black people, deploying tactics similar to those that some officers use today.
For example, Mac compared the slave patrols ability to confront formally enslaved Black people to the stop-and-frisk policies still used in many states.
Ray, like many others, said he is deeply disturbed that the Senate did not vote on the proposed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Super tragic, he said.
Report: Black People Are Still Killed By Police At A Higher Rate Than Other Groups
After all the attention the Black Lives Matter-led racial justice movement generated after George Floyds death in 2020, new data show that the number of Black people killed by police has actually increased over the last two years.
According to data collected by The Washington Post, police shot and killed at least 1,055 people nationwide last year, the most since the newspaper began tracking fatal shootings by officers in 2015. That is more than the 1,021 shootings in 2020 and the 999 in 2019.
Black people, who account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, accounted for 27 percent of those fatally shot and killed by police in 2021, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group that tracks police shootings. That means Black people are twice as likely as white people to be shot and killed by police officers.
Its bad and its sad, but its not shocking that were still being killed at a higher rate, said Karundi Williams, the CEO of re:power, a national organization that trains Black people to become political leaders. When we have moments of racial injustice that is thrust in the national spotlight, there is an uptick of outrage, and people take to the streets. But then the media tends to move on to other things, and that consciousness decreases. But we never really got underneath the problem.
Williams said there is also an inherent foe that prevents widespread change.
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Akai Gurley Nov 20 2014
Akai Gurley, 28, was shot and killed by a police officer while walking in a dimly lit New York City public housing stairwell with his girlfriend. Gurley, who was unarmed, was pronounced dead at a hospital. New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton called the shooting an accidental discharge.
Officer: CHARGED and convicted of negligent homicide
Rookie Peter Liang, was charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and two counts of official misconduct.
Award: $4.1 million
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Eliminating Preventable Deaths Due To The Use Of Lethal Force
The need for effective strategies to reduce preventable legal intervention fatalities has resulted in numerous recommendations from policing organizations, policy-makers, federal and state agencies, researchers, and concerned communities. One recommendation has been to increase training in tactical disengagement and conflict de-escalation.2,58 Recent reports have called for restructuring police culture around the core principle of sanctity of all human life, emphasizing the need to slow the situation down or tactically disengage as an alternative to the current model of never back down, move in and take charge.2,58 Several police departments around the U.S. are currently implementing training in tactical disengagement, de-escalation, and preservation of life, some modeled on programs in other countries like the United Kingdom, that have successfully reduced their use of force.2,19 Related approaches may include changes to training or policy on use of less than lethal force technologies, such as chemical sprays or conducted energy devices, to control or incapacitate combative individuals, with some evidence suggesting decreased officer and civilian injuries associated with agency adoption of these tools.32,6971 Further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of these approaches in reducing both civilian and LE injuries.
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Where Do Most Fatal Police Killings Happen
A common assumption is that fatal police shootings most often occur in urban locations, because some of those areas are perceived to be plagued by high levels of community gun violence. But a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine in May 2020 found fatal police shooting rates were as high in rural areas as in urban areas. Suburban locations were found to have somewhat lower rates.
And a separate, 2019 study from Harvard suggests that different neighborhoods present disparate risks of police violence: Researchers found that the risk of Black people being killed by police was highest in predominantly white neighborhoods.
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Criticism By Dallas Police Association
The then-president of the Dallas Police Association, Mike Mata, stated that due to the criticism of militarization of police, someone within the Dallas Police Departments chain of command ordered the officers assigned to the protest to not wear military-style bulletproof vests because they did not want the officers to look too militaristic, aggressive and instead to wear standard issue kevlar vests, which were not able to protect against the rifle rounds Johnson fired. For the same reasons, officers were not able to arm themselves with long guns, such as AR-15s. Mata was interviewed by the local CBS affiliate KDFW and said, lot of those shots, and a lot of those wounds were chest shots, lower abdomen wound shots, and those heavy vests would have covered them.
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Leveraging The Race Of The Officer
Intuitively, it seems reasonable to assume that black police officers have less antiblack bias than white officers do. So in theory, if white officers are shooting black suspects out of antiblack bias, black officers should shoot black suspects less often.
However, this assumption is difficult to leverage in a statistical analysis. For one thing, the African-American population is not evenly distributed throughout the country in places with higher black populations, both police and civilians are more likely to be black, causing officer and civilian race to be correlated in national data sets unless researchers account for local demographics. Also, black officers are more likely to be assigned to black neighborhoods even within some cities, often by choice. For example, a recent study by Bocar Ba and four coauthors, using data from Chicagowhere district assignments are based on officers preferences and seniority found: Black officers have the greatest preference for working in majority-black districts and the lowest preference for working in majority-white districts.
Bearing in mind these limitations, it helps to divide research on officer race into three categories: studies focusing on the overall racial composition of police departments studies of the correlation between officer and civilian race among those shot by police and an especially promising study that leveraged the quasi-random assignment of cops of different races to calls for service.
How Many People Have Been Killed By Us Police Since George Floyd
At least 1,068 people have been killed by police since the death of the unarmed Black man a year ago.
On May 25, 2020, at 9:25pm , George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man from the US state of Minnesota became yet another victim of police brutality when he was killed by police. Floyds killing triggered worldwide protests demanding justice and an end to systemic racism. On April 20, 2021, Floyds killer, former police officer Derek Chauvin, was found guilty of murder and manslaughter. Chauvin, who is white, faces at least 75 years in prison. His sentencing has been set for June 25.
Between January 2013 and May 2021, police in the United States killed at least 9,179 people, according to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group. Since Floyds death exactly a year ago, the group has recorded at least 1,068 police killings across the country an average of three killings every day.
According to the groups latest figures, police killings are at similar rates to past years. Some states have seen a reduction while others have seen a rise in killings.
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The Claim: Us Police Killed Eight Unarmed Black Men In 2019
In response to the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd, Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of the conservative group Turning Point USA, posted a statement on Facebook.
Kirk claimed in a during the Blackout Tuesday campaign that, according to the Washington Posts database of police shootings, police killed eight unarmed Black men in 2019. Other Facebook pages have reposted the video, adding to its viewership.
Kirk uses this figure while arguing that systemic racism does not exist within law enforcement. He did not mention in the video that Black Americans make up 13% of the population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans, as the Post reported. He also did not mention, as explained by Naomi Zack in her book on racial profiling and police homicide that “when 4.4 million random stop and frisks were conducted in New York City, during the period from 2004 2012, even though Blacks were disproportionately singled out, the incidence of further police action was less for Blacks than for whites.”
Kirk’s claim that police killed eight unarmed Black men in 2019 is incorrect for several reasons.
Racial Disparity In Police Shootings Unchanged Over 5 Years
Over the past five years there has been no reduction in the racial disparity in fatal police shooting victims despite increased use of body cameras and closer media scrutiny, according to a new report by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Using information from a national database compiled and maintained by The Washington Post, researchers found that victims identifying as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color , whether armed or unarmed, had significantly higher death rates compared with whites. And those numbers remained relatively unchanged from 2015 to May 2020. The report appears in the Oct. 27 edition of the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health.
While the data are already publicly available, the researchers decided to enter it into the scientific literature and present it using methods that are accepted by science as rigorous and robust. Its critical, said author Dowin Boatright, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Yale, that fatal police shootings of BIPOC are recognized and treated as a public health emergency.
Those killed by police on average are young people the average age for all victims is 34, Boatright said. For Black people, the average age is 30. For Hispanics killed, the average age is 33 for Native Americans, 31 and for white people, 38.
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