I admit, this is personal to me. I’m biased here and cannot watch this without knowing what I know about this neighborhood, about the lives of the children, teenagers and parents who live where this just happened.*** I have been busy this week with my two (white) grand babies visiting and though I heard about it, I haven’t been able to follow it closely.
Until last night. My grand babies went home.
That’s when I saw the video.
The body-cam video. The police video that includes the 911 call that initiated the cops stopping 19-year-old De’Von Bailey on foot in front of a ghetto apartment near a park on a the first Saturday in August. The body-cam video that ends up the way they always seem to end up.
With a black man or a black boy dead.
I am sickened. Beyond sickened. I thought I sort of understood. I did not begin to understand. That’s why I am posting this. I need to know if it is just me. I’m talking to you, white people. I need to know that I am not the only white person that is fucking not okay with this.
This kid, De’Von Bailey, had a gun (not in his hand, in his pants.) He had form (pending and dismissed juvenile.) He had just committed an armed robbery (on an acquaintance at a park that netted a “few dollars.”) The cops were called, as they should have been. The cops approached, as they should have. The suspects put their hands up as ordered. When approached with intent to cuff, De’Von ran. The cops instantly shot at him 8 times (that’s what I heard on the tape) striking him with 4 bullets, 3 in the back. It was over within seconds.
The police just released the police body cam footage, though it hasn’t been two weeks since the tragedy, and almost immediately returned the two police officers to duty. In the video you can watch they cops scramble (eagerly? desperately?) to find and retrieve the gun that was so tangled in Bailey’s pants they had to cut them off in order to reach it. You can watch and hear Bailey moaning and bleeding and dying as they go through these motions, with less care than if he had been a wounded animal. There is no question that De’Von no longer posed a threat at that point. (He died, but, hey — the gun was saved.)
But there is, and should be, a larger question as to whether or not De’Von Bailey ever posed a threat to the police. It appears the cops and the city* have moved on. Done and done. Same as usual.***
Maybe I need to ask this as a question, because I seem to be confused. Is there, and should there be, a larger question as to whether or not De’Von Bailey ever posed a threat to the police?
You have to watch and hear the whole thing (or at least one view of the police video cam, there are 3, including the shooters) to make a fair judgement. But even then, I know, people’s takeaways from this are all over the place. It is, I hope, disturbing for anyone to watch a person die unnecessarily, as others nearby seem indifferent to the dying.
*It’s difficult to understand anyone taking pleasure in such a death, but by the hundreds of comments on local newsfeeds (the local newspaper has disabled comments but supports the shooting) many people are comfortable expressing from behind their keyboards and avatars that the “thug had it coming.”
Watch the video here, with the 911 call that preceded the shooting.
media.krdo.com/...
News of this has gone national to a limited extent, but it’s not as cut and dried because Bailey was armed. The Washington Post reported on it a few days ago:
Bailey’s family on Thursday reiterated demands for an independent probe into his death, alleging that the newly released body-cam footage supports their claim that the teen was no threat as he sprinted away.
“Mr. Bailey was trying desperately to flee from the police. He did not have any weapon in his hand, and he had not shown any weapon when he was shot in the back and killed,” Darold Killmer, one of the family’s attorneys, told reporters at a news conference.
The Colorado Springs Police Department has declined to comment on the case to local media, citing an ongoing investigation by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
The graphic body-camera footage has drawn new scrutiny to a case that has sparked fiery protests, including one where two bail bondsmen were arrested after drawing weapons in a scuffle with demonstrators, in a city where police have fatally shot five people this year.
The Bailey family’s attorney, Darold Killmer, has noted several problems with the case. He repeated the family’s request for an independent investigation, even suggesting that the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office and Colorado Springs police have a “conflict of interest” with being each other’s regular investigators of one another’s fatal shootings.
“You hand off the investigation to your friends,” said Killmer, “and things come out okay.”
Darold Killmer, an attorney representing the Bailey family, said that while Bailey did have a gun, he didn't point it at the officers who shot him. He compared the situation to the Dayton shooting, where the shooter had shot civilians and pointed a gun at officers.
...
When asked why Bailey ran from police, Killmer hypothesized that Bailey, as a young black man, had a different perspective of police officers and might have felt that he was "better off somewhere else."
www.krdo.com/...
Two black pastors in Colorado Springs spoke out after the police officers were back on duty on Aug. 16 — they were “appalled” that Sgt. Alan Van’t Land and officer Blake Evenson were assigned to administrative work, per department protocol, so quickly after the fatal Aug. 3 shooting. They noted that this same police department managed to take Robert Dear alive after he killed and wounded many Colorado Springs citizens in the Planned Parenthood mass shooting. They have a very different take on the situation.
livestream.com/… (Pastors’ press conference)
“Who knows whose next?”
“Officers, or Judge/Jury/&Xecutioners?”
*** This is personal to me. This happened on the grounds and in the park surrounding the school I taught at twenty-five years ago. When I took the job at this school, John Adams Elementary, my own children attended the same school district, at schools only about 10 miles away. My kids’ schools were excellent. Not perfect, but excellent. I had a bunch of kids (yours, mine and ours), so I’d stayed home and run my own daycare until our youngest was in preschool. I had 5 of my own kids attending our excellent public elementary school in one year — so I knew it pretty well. They had a full-time art teacher, dynamic award-winning music and PE teachers, inter-murals of all kinds for the kids, a beautiful picturesque playground, carpeted rooms, matching chairs and desks, globes and maps, and everything! A kiln! Social studies books, science materials! It was beautiful. And the teachers were, well, really good. And anything they else they needed or wanted? We (parents) got it for them!
I paid a babysitter $15 an hour to come watch my daycare so I could volunteer to sit and cut paper circles in each of my own children’s classes once a year. (And when I was a teacher myself? I got a substitute and still “volunteered” until my kids were in middle school.) Because that’s what parents do in the “suburbs.” That’s privilege we don’t even think about.
When I was shown my 4th grade classroom at Adams Elementary, I was stunned. I knew it was an older school. I knew it was in a poor neighborhood. But these were not the desks my kids sat at. These were the desks that I sat at. And I mean from the 60s and 70s and not more than two or three the same of any kind. Many were broken, most were marred. But they were clean. I found that out right away. No amount of scrubbing improved them. When I was a kid, these desks had been newish, and each class had a matching set, unless there happened to be a really big or extra small kid in the group and an accommodation was made. My heart sunk a little.
But I set about maximizing the room and planning my curriculum...Within weeks I was shocked to find things I of which I will only list a few here —
- no art teacher
- no art room
- no kiln
- not even a fucking class set of paint brushes
- no globes
- no maps (a few pre 1960s which I eventually resorted to once I found them)
- no atlases
- no social studies books (some VERY OLD ones I resorted to once I dug them out)
- no before or after school activities
- no
- no
- no
- no I cannot possibly list all the blatant inequities
This school was in the same district as many other schools I had been in — my own kids did not go to near the best. It had been worn down by years and years of hard living and neglect, a 3 or 4 or no person PTA. Scared parents who hadn’t a clue how to work the system. But I taught there for six years and helped to bring an arts program to fruition. In lieu of any source material, I created my own curriculum — teaching American history through Black History, and Colorado history through Native American history. I loved that school, and I loved those kids. I loved the traumatized community that fought for survival. I saw the struggle, I heard the stories. I know the pain of the poverty, the addiction, the hopelessness and the fear and violence and how it cycles through the generations. But I have seen this city turn its back on the children and residents of that neighborhood before. I am sad but not surprised to see it again.
Actually, I believe the city lives with its back turned on this community of color.
I have noted before that in the Halloween Shooting of 2015 an armed man was seen walking down a main street in Colorado Springs with an assault rifle. A neighbor called it in, but because Colorado is an open carry state, the cops didn’t pursue it. 10 minutes later another call came in. Shots fired. 4 people ended up being shot, 3 died — one was a friend of my daughters. I’ll always wonder if she’d still be alive if the neighbor had lied and said, “There’s a black man with an assault rifle walking down the street.”