A 5-week-old child was killed Monday after a car crash ended police pursuit of her mother. Candace Gill, 38, is alleged to have stolen baby supplies from a Monroe, Louisiana, Walmart, according to local CBS affiliate KNOE 8. Another passenger, Edward Williams, died at the scene.
These tragic deaths are indicative of a significant problem, one the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade will make worse: Raising children is increasingly out of reach for many people in the United States. These deaths come on the heels of reports of baby formula shortages across the country, while price-gouging corporations blame rising prices on inflation while amassing record profits.
In fact, Walmart’s 2022 fiscal year profits—$572.75 billion—were up 2.4% from the 2021 fiscal year.
States like Louisana already have a poor safety net, and Congress (rather, Republicans plus two Democratic senators) stands in the way of extending President Joe Biden’s Child Tax Credit expansion, which cut poverty by at least 30%. Congress is also unable to take action on rising housing prices, childcare costs are as high as college tuition; factor in rising food costs, and life is untenable for many within the United States.
According to official reports, police pursued Gill for this minor property theft—from a multibillion-dollar company owned by one of the wealthiest families in the world—onto a highway. While being pursued by police, Gill crashed, killing her infant she was only trying to care for by the desperate means at her disposal. She fled the scene, and was apprehended the next day.
WSAZ reports that “Gill is charged with two counts of manslaughter, aggravated obstruction of a highway, four counts of negligent injury, theft, and several traffic violations. She also had other active warrants out for her arrest, including for theft of a firearm, possession of a firearm by a felon, and traffic charges.”
The scenario is reminiscent of the man killed by police in Kissimmee, Florida, on April 27, after a confrontation in a Target parking lot sparked by the alleged theft of Pokemon cards and pizza. Two others—just 18 and 19—were also shot, but survived.
In both cases, employees called police to report petty theft, which then escalated to police presence. And in both cases, people died as a result, including an infant. In both cases, police claim they did the right thing. Perhaps it’s easy to say “shouldn’t have been stealing” and move onto the next story, but consider that, instead of using investigative techniques or a strategy of deescalation, these officers chose violence.
Police car chases are dangerous to the public and unnecessary; rarely are they needed to find a suspect, and they put police officers, suspects, and innocent civilians in danger. Direct armed confrontations are too common in a country where police are overwhelming trained to escalate situations; it’s no surprise physical force is the preferred, knee-jerk response.
As Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the BBC in May 2021, "Most of the training in the US is focused on various types of use of force, primarily the various types of physical force. The communication skills are largely ignored by most police academies … This is why you see officers very rapidly escalating from initial communication to the actual physical use of force, because this is how they train." One such training group, called “Killology," found itself facing scrutiny after the uprisings following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.
Undoubtedly, many people believe the man killed in the chase, and Gill—who will most likely spend years behind bars, the death of her infant boring deep into her psyche—deserve their “punishment.” The number of ways our government has failed them, perhaps even before their own births, and so many other victims we don’t know, is a stain on our society.
These two cases are just the latest to demonstrate the core fueling the call to “defund” police. Police’s primary role is to protect property and capital, not the people; their primary role is to target “crimes of poverty,” or crimes that wouldn’t have happened if a person wasn’t impoverished.
Yet what fuels poverty? Wage theft and other corporate crimes often outpace amounts stolen through theft or burglary. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found in 2017 that $8 billion is stolen from workers annually. The L.A. Times reported that in 2020, losses to “organized retail crime [were] $2.1 billion,” but even that report show corporations are vastly over reporting retail theft. Of course, corporate crimes, and those of wealthy individuals among the top 1%, are rarely criminally prosecuted. On the rare occasion when there is any accountability, it is often barren of any meaning of justice.
These two cases are just the most recent evidence of a growing mound of lost and striving souls, crushed by a boot worn by the wretched, the shameless, the contemptuous, and the corrupt. These cases don’t demonstrate the GOP’s claims of rising crime so much as display our flawed social and political values. These values, if we can call them that, are leaving many people treading water in a deep and churning sea, as others sail past on hundred-million-dollar yachts—with the police knocking off anyone attempting to grab on for dear life—or the life of their 5-week-old infant.