Again
It happened again, this time in Texas. A White, small town police officer arrived on the scene of a “possible fight at a gas station”, the Kwik Check. The fight was over, and an unarmed Black man was there, along with another man and a woman. The Black man raised his hands and tried to explain what was going on. When the officer moved to detain him, he started to walk away. The officer used a Taser on him, and when that didn’t work they way he wanted; he shot him with his service weapon. The Black man died.
What was going on? According to witnesses, the Black man, Jonathan Price, intervened inside the gas station when the other man assaulted the woman. The two men fought, and the struggle moved outside. Price, 31, a former college football player, was singled out when the officer arrived.
After a brief investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), the Wolfe City police officer, 22 year-old Shaun Lucas, was arrested and charged with murder. The Department noted that Lucas’ actions were “not objectively reasonable”.
Procedure
I am not a police officer, but it should be procedure that when an officer arrives on the scene he or she should gain control of the situation. Without knowing what happened before, the officer would want to make sure that the participants were “safe” from continuing to fight each other, or attacking the officer. So it would be normal procedure to control both, and then sort out the situation. And if I were that officer, I would focus on the “biggest” threat, physically, to me. The former college football player would probably fit that definition.
And when he refused to be “detained”, then that should be a concern to the officer. But it is from that point, that the DPS felt “reasonable” was lost.
Many will say that Price should have submitted, and not tried to walk away. “If he had only followed the lawful orders of the officer, he would still be alive today”. But that still doesn’t answer the question: if an unarmed suspect refuses to obey police orders, should deadly force be used?
We haven’t heard Officer Lucas’s side of the story, only from others who witnessed the event. Did something happen when he Tazed Price that caused Lucas to feel threatened, in fear for his own safety? It’s the only answer that would make any sense.
Results
But in the end, another unarmed Black man is dead, shot by the police. And it is in that fact alone that we need to face the issue. Somehow that’s “baked in” to the system. Sure, Lucas was a young cop, alone in a small town, facing a situation he was unable to control. But what were the other possibilities to “defuse” the situation? Maybe it was just a matter of having more police personnel there. Or of the officer saying the “right words” to Price, or maybe just letting Price walk now, and Lucas comes back with more officers later. Any of those would be better choices than shooting Price, better choices for both Price and Officer Lucas, now facing murder charges.
Is this about “funding” the police? Sure, if two officers were available, perhaps Lucas wouldn’t have felt so threatened that he needed to use his weapon. Or, if a trained “negotiator/de-escalator” were part of a team, then Price would have been able to tell his story, without the need for Tasers or guns.
Numbers
But is this a racial thing? The statistics are clear: the chances of being killed by the police are much higher if you’re Black, and even higher if you’re a Black man. In the last nine months, 721 civilians have been shot by police, with 142 of them Black. That’s almost 20% of those killed, while Blacks are 13% of the population in the United States (Statista). For young Black men, the risk of being killed by police is 1 per 1000 (PNAS). Black men face a risk of being killed by the police more than three times greater than white men (PAA).
So yes, it is about race. And it’s about training. It’s about making a national decision that this isn’t just about the “bad apple” cops. And no, I am NOT saying that police officers are racists (though there probably are some). What I am saying is that there is a problem, and we need to address that problem in a forthright manner. It is “baked in” the system, and it needs to be fixed.
