The Colorado Fraternal Order of Police responded to criticism Sunday after Robert Lewis Dear allegedly killed three and injured nine others in an assault on a Planned Parenthood in Colorado. In a Facebook post the union decried social media concern that white shooters like Dear could be apprehended while unarmed black civilians are in constant danger of being killed by police. According to ThinkProgress:
“In yesterday’s heroic police action the shooter was given the opportunity to surrender. The choice to live or die was his. He chose to live, laid down his weapon, complied with all commands and peacefully surrendered,” the statement reads. “What the race baiting morons who believe that he was spared because he was white fail to acknowledge is that just this year alone there have been numerous shootings of police officers where the suspects were taken into custody. Many of those suspects were persons of color.”
While the statement did not name the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement specifically, it did reference the the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” slogan that was born after Michael Brown’s shooting. The phrase became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, which grew during and after the protests in Ferguson.
Activists across the country have pointed to the disparate treatment of white and black people confronted by police. Mass murderers like Dear, Dylann Roof — who was fed Burger King after shooting and killing nine people at the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston, South Carolina — and James Holmes, who killed 12 people and injured 70 others in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, have been taken into custody unscathed. After the biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas, which ended with nine people dead and many more injured, some of the gang members were allowed to use their cell phones, handcuff-free.
The statement, which appears to have either been removed or made inaccessible, goes on to call Black Lives Matter a “false narrative.” However, the statement neglects to mention cases like Naeschylus Vinzant, a black man noted by the Washington Post’s database as the sole unarmed citizen to die in an officer-involved shooting in Colorado this year. It also ignores the undeniable disparity in the likelihood of death by police, even adjusted for crime and active shooter status. The fact that some black shooters are indeed brought in without killing them does not counter the criticism that both unarmed and armed black people are more likely than their respective unarmed and armed white counterparts to die in police encounters.