On Sunday, Seattle police shot and killed 30-year-old Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother of three after she called police about an attempted burglary in her apartment. While the details remain unclear, the shooting serves as a sobering reminder that black lives routinely meet death at the hands of police. Video and audio footage of the incident have now been released and they appear to show police officers telling Lyles that they would not shoot her, that her children could be heard crying in the background and that the officers considered using tasers to subdue her but did not actually have tasers on them. This raises a lot more questions about the motives and training of the officers.
In this video, you can faintly hear one of the officers tell Lyles, “You’re not going to get shot. Everything’s under control, ma’am.” But we know that later they did the exact opposite—both officers fired multiple rounds at her, killing her, while her children were present.
Officers had been called to her house before, on June 5. And she appeared to be mentally unstable at the time. This was in the arrest report so it seemed to be known to the officers who responded on Sunday. This incident was the subject of conversation they appeared to have, as per the audio recording, prior to confronting her on Sunday.
On the scratchy dash cam audio released Monday, the two officers can be heard preparing for the call by discussing the previous police call to her house. An arrest report for the June 5 encounter describes Lyles as speaking bizarrely about wanting to "morph into a wolf," about the officers being devils and also members of the Ku Klux Klan. [...]
During the early June incident, Lyles allegedly threatened officers with scissors but they were able to convince her to put them down. She was arrested and charged with obstruction of a public official and harassment. Her family claims that a condition of her release was that she seek mental health counseling. So, again, it seems fair to say that police already knew that she had a history of instability. What exactly are the police procedures for dealing with the mentally ill? Because in incident after incident, it appears as if their strategy is often “shoot first, ask questions later.” Especially when it comes to black people. Why don’t the police, who are supposed to be able to de-escalate crises, receive adequate training to deal with persons with mental illness? They get sufficient training in weaponry but what about trying not to use those weapons? Cops continue to engage in an endless, made-up war with black people—and they are winning.
Charleena Lyles reportedly had a knife. She was also described as “tiny.” How do two grown men, officers with guns, perceive her as a threat so great that she needs to be taken out with deadly force—especially while her children are still in the apartment?
According to the dash cam audio, they seemed to be having a normal conversation with her, as she tells them about what's been stolen — she confirms a missing Xbox. Then there's a four-second pause, followed by a sudden commotion — you can hear Lyles say, 'You ready?', she calls them an expletive, and the cops react, saying "We need help," presumably over their radios, and commanding someone to "get back."
This commotion lasts 16 seconds, and then they fire the gunshots that kill her.
Twenty seconds—that’s all it took to end her life. And they haven't even said why. “Police said Lyles was armed with one or more kitchen knives, but they have not said whether she directly threatened the officers.” This tragic story is yet another example of how state violence takes black lives in an instant, without hesitation. Charleena Lyles—a pregnant mother of three, a woman with mental illness, and a black woman. Gone in an instant. Not that this will even make it to trial, but if by some miracle it does, as the verdict in the Philando Castile case demonstrates, we know it’s incredibly unlikely that she will receive any kind of justice.