Advocates for police reform have focused on challenging a number of unfair and questionable policing practices, especially the killings of unarmed civilians by police. Of course, what most often captures our attention are the stories where this issue intersects with race—as minorities (black men and women, in particular) are disproportionately killed by police relative to their presence in the population. But police do in fact kill unarmed white people, too. And in Minneapolis, they killed an Australian woman on Saturday night but no one seems to know why.
An Australian woman who was about to get married was fatally shot overnight Saturday by a Minneapolis police officer who did not have his body camera turned on, officials said.
The woman, Justine Damond, was shot as the officers were responding to her 911 call of an assault near her home in the Fulton neighborhood. [...]
According to sources, upon arriving near Damond’s home after the 911 call, the police cruiser pulled into the alley. Damond went to speak to them and was talking to the officer who was driving at his door when the officer in the passenger seat shot through the driver’s side door and killed her. Police found no weapon on the scene. As a reminder, police in Seattle also shot Charleena Lyles after she called them for help about a burglary. How is it that very people who call the police for help wind up as victims themselves?
Police officials said they were looking into the circumstances of the shooting and why the officers were not using their body cameras, as required in such encounters.
Police officers in Minneapolis became required to wear body cameras after Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed Philando Castile last summer. Of course, in that case, video footage didn’t seem to make much of a difference since Yanez was acquitted for murdering Castile as he reached for his identification which was not only caught on dash cam but also streamed live on Facebook by Castile’s girlfriend. So it’s worth questioning the utility of body cameras in convicting corrupt or poorly trained cops when they harm or kill people, but we can’t have that debate if officers aren’t using them at all.
“Basically my mom’s dead because a police officer shot her for reasons I don’t know,” [her fiancé’s son] told The Star Tribune of Minneapolis. “I demand answers. If anybody can help, just call police and demand answers. I’m so done with all this violence.”
The officer who killed Damond has already been sued once in his two years with the Minneapolis Police Department. The lawsuit claims that he assaulted a woman in the process of responding to a call in which he and two other officers took the woman to a hospital after claiming she was having a mental health crisis—which she refutes. While details are still emerging in this case, we know now that this officer has at least two documented incidents involving women he’s supposed to help, one is now dead, and that he wasn’t wearing his body camera when he was supposed to. These are all serious problems that need to be addressed.
And while we are at it, let’s acknowledge that the victim’s identity matters here. An unarmed white woman was killed by an officer (of color) after calling the police for help. By all accounts, the way her background is being portrayed is that she was beloved and a productive and contributing member of her community. She was supposed to get married in August and seems to have had a wonderful future ahead of her. If everything in society reinforces that black lives don’t matter and can be killed by the state without accountability, we know without a doubt that white lives matter just by how much attention this story is getting and how it’s being told. Is this what it will take for us to finally get serious about reforming policing? Do a bunch of unarmed white women need to get shot and killed before we truly acknowledge the breadth and depth of this problem? Now that all this attention is being paid that police also kill white people, maybe people of color’s voices on this issue can finally be heard and taken seriously.