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| Stephon Clark, 22, another unarmed American citizen shot and killed by police |
But it's hard to say how much comfort that's going to bring Clark's family members considering he was shot multiple times for holding a cell phone.
As more detailed information about this incident begins to trickle out, a familiar narrative from the Sacramento Police Department is already beginning to unfold - the now familiar claim that the two officers who fired 20 shots at Clark (including shots fired when he fell to his hands and knees) did so because they feared for their lives.
The two officers were reportedly called to the scene in response to someone reportedly breaking the windows of cars in the neighborhood, when they confronted Stephon Clark in the backyard of the home where he lived, they claim he advanced or moved towards them with something in his hand.
Seconds later an officer yelled "Gun!" and the two officers fired 20 shots; the object in Clark's hands turned out to be a cellphone.
He was shot about 60 seconds after the SPD officers on the ground first encountered him - adding to the already-suspicious fatal shooting is the fact that one of the officers can be heard telling another to mute the sound on his body camera immediately after the shooting, right before the audio cuts out.
The arc of this investigation is obviously going to take a long time, especially given the growing media attention, mounting public outrage, and the involvement of the state attorney's office.
But one of the things that troubles me about this shooting is that the officers themselves claim that they were sent to the scene in response to reports of a man breaking car windows.
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| 21-year-old Isaiah Malailua |
The violent response of the two Sacramento PD officers to a black man holding his cellphone in his own backyard is remarkably different from the Chicago PD's response to an armed white man arrested in Chicago's Union Station on Friday.
According to an article by Chicago Tribune reporter William Lee, a California man named Isaiah Malailua (pictured left) was arrested at an Amtrak ticket counter wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a 9mm handgun.
Authorities quickly apprehended him after police K-9 dogs detected the odor of explosive residue on a duffel bag that belonged to Malailua that was found in another part of the station.
Now obviously I'm not suggesting that Chicago authorities should have just yelled "Gun!" and started firing in the middle of a crowded train station - they did the right thing, they located him, surrounded him and took him into custody.
The point I'm making here is that the officers who arrested Malailua in Chicago knew he was potentially dangerous because a Greyhound bus ticket with his name on it was found inside the duffel bag with the explosive residue on it that was detected by the K-9 - they also found police SWAT gear inside the bag that he'd apparently stolen from the NYPD.
So they knew who he was, and when they found him at the ticket counter he had a handgun on him and was wearing a bullet-proof vest - that's got "potential mass shooter" written all over it.
Considering recent events and the fact that Malailua was inside a crowded major urban transit hub, authorities on the scene could have been justified in shooting him, but they didn't.
What role did Malailua's skin being white have to do with how the Chicago authorities treated him?
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| Stephon Clark's brother Stevante leads a protest chant during a City Council meeting Tuesday night |
In Sacramento, the SPD had no idea who Stephon Clark was - they saw his skin color and flipped the fuck out.
Now if I was a cop, and I'm not, a report of a suspect breaking car windows on the street could sound like garden variety juvenile vandalism.
Or worse, maybe someone under the influence of heroin, crystal meth or crack desperately looking for a quick score to sell something to get high.
It's hardly the modus operandi of a professional car thief, so someone breaking car windows sounds either desperate or stupid - it makes a lot of noise, attracts a lot of attention in a neighborhood after 9pm at night, and it increases the chances of getting busted by the cops.
Does that sound like a situation where you go in with a gun drawn ready to fire shots at the first person you see?
Or does it sound like the kind of situation where it's better to ascertain who it is and what's going on?
Granted it was dark out, but responding SPD officers had a police helicopter hovering overhead that had guided them to the general location, and based on the audio that was released, the SPD officers didn't identify themselves as police officers when they encountered Stephon Clark.
If you haven't already seen it, take a look at this body cam footage when the two SPF officer come upon Clark in his grandmother's backyard - it's not bloody or anything, you can't see the actual shooting.
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| No charges: Baton Rouge PD officers Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake, II |
He's out of breath and says the words so fast it's hard to hear what he's saying - plus the police helicopter is hovering overhead.
About 6 seconds later the officer yells, "Show me your hands-Gun-Gun-Gun!" and both officers just start firing shots.
It's the initial contact that's troubling.
In some ways it reminds me of the initial contact that Baton Rouge PD officers Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake, II demonstrated when they first encountered 37-year-old Alton Sterling in front of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the early morning hours of July 5, 2016.
The two officers were responding to an anonymous caller alleging a man was waving a gun around in front of the store, they pulled up, approached Sterling (who was known to sell CD's outside the store), interrupted a conversation he was having with two women and told him to put his hands on a car.
Not having done anything illegal and not knowing what the officers wanted with them, Sterling protested and tried to pull away - at which point one of the officers pointed their loaded gun at Sterling and said:
"Bitch, I'm gonna kill you." 90 seconds later Alton Sterling was shot dead at point blank range while on the ground pinned on his back by both officers - Salamoni fired six shots from his weapon.
There was no, "Police officer, we need to speak with you." or "Show me your hands!" or "Freeze! Police officer!"
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| Alton Sterling seconds before being shot by Salamoni |
The last time I blogged about Salamoni and Lake back on May 5, 2017 was just after the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions announced they would not pursue criminal charges against either man.
As you likely heard, on Tuesday Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that the state would not be filing criminal charges against either Salamoni or Lake.
This despite the store owner Abdullah Muflahi saying that Sterling was not waving a gun or threatening anyone, and never brandished a gun or threatened the two officers with it at any point.
Muflahi, who witnessed the shooting, says Sterling had no idea why the two policemen were even there when they threw him on the hood of a parked car and tasered him before wrestling him to the ground.
In an April 15, 2012 op-ed in the New York Times published two months after the violent racist psychopath George Zimmerman stalked, attacked then shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, journalist and author Brent Staples observed:
"Young black men know that in far too many settings they will be seen not as individuals, but as the 'other', and given no benefit of the doubt....Society's message to black boys - 'we fear you and view you as dangerous' - is constantly reinforced. "
In his lengthy statement to the press on Tuesday, after stating that probable clause (rather than an actual crime), the presence of drugs in his system and resisting an arrest for something which he was never informed, were all contributing factors in Alton Sterling being shot and killed, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry concluded "that both officers acted in a reasonable and justified manner in the shooting death of Mr. Sterling."
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| Writer Brent Staples |
Were the two Sacramento PD officers who fired 20 shots at Stephon Clark while he was in the backyard of his own home acting in a "reasonable and justified manner"?
The answer, which must come from a court of law, will obviously take time to articulate and materialize.
But it should be viewed in the context of the words of Brent Staples from his op-ed written in the wake of Trayvon Martin:
"Very few Americans make a conscious decision to subscribe to racist views. But the toxic connotations that the culture has associated with blackness have been embedded in thought, language, and social convention for hundreds of years. This makes it easy for people to see the world through a profoundly bigoted lens without being aware that they are doing so."
It's that lens that lies at the heart of the death of Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Trayvon Martin and so many other men of color in this country.
Tried, convicted, sentenced and executed in a span of minutes - far from any court of law, denied the right to legal counsel guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and brutally silenced before having the chance to testify on their own behalf.
And as the cases of Alton Sterling and Trayvon Martin both demonstrated, found complicit in their own deaths and cruelly forced into the unfathomable role of being silent witnesses for their own prosecution by a judicial system that views plaintiffs and defendants through "a profoundly bigoted lens."
There's nothing remotely reasonable or justified about that.
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