A small group of protestors in Phoenix, Arizona, met employees of the Maricopa County Prosecutor as they arrived for work on Monday, protesting the agency’s decision last Friday not to charge a Winslow police officer in the death of a Native American woman. More than 200 people rallied last April to demand that an “unbiased investigation take place in the death of Loreal Tsingine, shot five times by Winslow police officer Austin Shipley, after allegedly threatening him with a pair of scissors.”
Winslow police said they received multiple calls from a convenience store of a woman shoplifting and harassing store employees on March 27. But the suspect had already left the scene by the time officers arrived.
Officers began a search, and Shipley located the suspect walking on a street close to the store.
According to a police report, Shipley attempted to detain Tsingine, but she resisted arrest and was taken to the ground.
The officer said Tsingine swung the scissors at him, and he retreated with his gun drawn and gave multiple commands for her to stop and drop the scissors.
The police report said Tsingine didn't comply and got up and aggressively ran at Shipley with scissors in hand before he shot her. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to media reports, serious concerns were raised about Shipley’s fitness for duty, which were not heeded.
Tsingine’s death at the hands of a Winslow police officer underscores calls by activists to pay attention to the interactions between Native Americans and law enforcement.
American Indians are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by the police, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, which studied police killings from 1999 to 2011 (the rate was determined as a percentage of total population). But apart from media outlets like Indian Country Today, almost no attention is paid to this pattern of violence against already devastated peoples.
Native Lives Matter, part of the Lakota Peoples’ Law Project, was created in part to address this disparity.