"Did y'all call the police?" Keith Scott's widow asked police officers as her husband lay dying
CHARLOTTE, N.C. ― When
Rakeyia Scott saw cops surrounding her husband, Keith Scott, she immediately
worried they might shoot him. She pulled out her cell phone camera. The horrifying video
she captured has now been seen millions of times. One poignant moment, however,
stands out.
As officers huddle
around her dying husband, she shouts out: “Did y’all call the police?”
Call the police. It’s
what one does, or is supposed to do, when a crime has been committed, when
someone is in need of help. The idea that the police exist to protect and serve
is so powerful that it broke through the reality of what she had just
witnessed: police shooting her husband to death.
She quickly caught her
mistake. “I mean, did y’all call the ambulance?” Given the nonchalant attitude
officers betrayed as Keith Scott lay on the pavement bleeding, she didn’t wait
for an answer and took it upon herself to call 911.
The reaction of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
officers to a man dying at their feet was strikingly familiar. The ubiquity of
cellphone, dashcam and surveillance video has transformed the way the public
understands police violence. But as scene after scene unfolds on shaky screens
and in grainy contours, another element of the violence is beginning to come
into focus: the pattern of officers seeming to show no concern for the person
they have shot, often fatally.
The nonchalance around the injured and the
dying is stunning in its own way. Set aside the question
of whether any particular shooting was justified, either legally or morally.
Perhaps it was. Perhaps the officer had no other choice. Even in such a situation,
though, the officer has just exercised the most terrifying of powers ― the use
of lethal force against another human being. And yet no care seems to be taken
of that human being.
Consider another
recent police shooting caught on video: that of Charles Kinsey, who survived.
Kinsey, a black behavioral therapist in North Miami, Florida, was trying to
help a man with autism who was sitting in the street blocking traffic. A
cellphone video shows Kinsey himself lying on the ground with his hands in the
air. He was trying to explain to police that the other man had a toy truck and
not a gun, contrary to what a 911
caller had reported. One of the officers
fired three times, hitting Kinsey in the leg. Then Kinsey said he was
handcuffed and left bleeding
on the street for 20 minutes before an ambulance arrived. And this was a case in
which the police understood, right from the start, that the man they shot was
the victim.
Letting the body lie
where it falls is a fairly common trend in these high-profile police shootings.
After Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police shot
and killed Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, on July 5, the officers
appeared rattled by what had happened. But as for Sterling, they said to “just
leave him,” according to a witness. In Ferguson, Missouri,
officers left Mike Brown’s body in the street for four
hours, an indignity that protesters have referred to often.
Cedrick Chatman was
shot four times, within 10 seconds, as he ran from officers on the south side
of Chicago. Then they handcuffed the dying teen, and an officer placed his
boot on top of him. After officers shot
12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the child was still alive. Even when
police realized he was just a kid with a toy gun, they still failed to offer
basic medical assistance. (They have since said they thought his toy gun was
real and were afraid for their lives.) Instead, when his 14-year-old sister,
T.R., ran toward him crying out, “My baby brother, they killed my baby
brother,” one of
the officers tackled her. She tried to get up and crawl toward her dying
brother, but the second officer dragged her down. She was handcuffed and put in
the backseat of a car, left to watch her brother continue to bleed while the
officers did nothing.
“When Tamir’s mother,
Samaria Rice, heard about the shooting and rushed to the park, the officers
refused to release T.R. into her custody and told her she had to choose between
going to the hospital with her fatally wounded 12-year-old son and staying with
her handcuffed 14-year-old daughter, who was in the back of the car with the
very same officers who had shot her son,” the Rice
family’s lawyers have since written.
On Dec. 28, an Ohio
grand jury chose
not to indict the officer who fatally shot Tamir. When a Tulsa,
Oklahoma, reserve deputy accidentally shot 44-year-old Eric Harris, he was
already being subdued
by other officers. “Oh shit, he shot me!” Harris says in the video. “I’m
losing my breath.” “Fuck your breath,”
one officer says in response, among the last words Harris would ever hear.
If black lives truly
mattered, police would make an attempt to save the dying. If black lives truly
mattered, the dead would be afforded more dignity. It is this lack of caring
for a fellow human being in his last moments, over and above the violence
itself, that reinforces the belief that black lives don’t matter.
After shooting LaQuan
McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke can be seen in video meandering
about the crime scene. When North Charleston, South Carolina, police
officer Michael Slager shot
and killed Walter Scott, he casually walked toward his body. Later,
more officers stand around Scott, and it takes some time for any of them to
check for a pulse.
Videos of police
behaving nonchalantly after shooting white people have also come to light.
Andrew Thomas, driving drunk, flipped his car and his passenger was thrown from
the vehicle. Paradise, California, police officer Patrick Feaster witnessed the
crash and pulled up behind them. Instead of attending to the passenger or
helping Thomas out of the car, he simply drew
his weapon, aimed, fired and struck Thomas in the neck, all in a
matter of seconds. Then he radioed that the driver was refusing to exit the
car, not mentioning for 11 minutes that he had shot him.
Almost instantly after
confronting Kajieme
Powell in St. Louis, police shot him. Then they rolled over his body
to put him in handcuffs. “They’re putting him in cuffs. He’s dead. Oh my God,”
one bystander can be heard saying
in a video. “Now they cuffin’ him, he’s already dead.”
In fact, in reviewing
nearly every publicly available video of a police shooting over the past year
or so, it is close to impossible to find footage of an officer aiding the
person who has been shot. Video
of 25-year-old Freddie Gray’s arrest shows him screaming out, possibly
in pain, as he is placed in the back of a Baltimore police van. Knowledge of
what happened inside the van is limited, at best. But prosecutors argued in
cases against several of the six officers charged in Gray’s death that not
buckling his seatbelt was a mistake, whether intentional or not, that
contributed to the severity of his injuries. William Porter, whose first trial
ended in a mistrial, has also been accused of failing
to ensure that Gray was provided immediate
medical assistance once he requested help. That lackluster
response, as much as the rough ride, might have cost Gray his life.
It’s this nonchalance
that gives weight to claims that too many police officers are operating more
like law enforcement warriors than like public servants dedicated to the protection
of others. Couple this with officers’ unwillingness to publicly shoulder any
moral responsibility in these deaths, and we can only conclude that they
believe those on the receiving end of police violence have invited death upon
themselves.
When social activists
like Colin Kaepernick protest police violence against black people, the
black-on-black crime rate is often raised in response. But Rakeyia Scott’s
powerful slip of the tongue ought to show people who couldn’t see it before why
that response is so offensive, and why police violence itself carries a unique
resonance. The police are supposed to be the ones you call for help. Learning
that they are, instead, the perpetrators of violence, flips everything upside
down. If police officers
want to convince the public they value black lives as much as any others, they
need to start acting like the life they just took matters to them. They need to
call the police.
