The United Police States of America

[MajGenl.Meade]

I love satire.

[liberty]

An interesting and informative take on what went wrong with policing in Baltimore, in the form of an interview with David Simon (who,as the introduction points out, was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun long before he wrote and produced “The Wire”:

David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the HBO television series “The Wire” (2002–2008). Simon is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday.

BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?

DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.

Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.

BK: How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.

DS:

(Read the rest of the interview here.)

Also of interest on that same web site (The Marshall Project):

Blue Shield: Did you know police have their own Bill of Rights?

Would it not be an effective idea to outlaw the presences of white people in black neighborhoods that have high levels of crime. Wouldn’t most of them be there for the purpose of buying illegal drugs, damn honkies.

[Lord Jim]

Would it not be an effective idea to outlaw the presences of white people in black neighborhoods that have high levels of crime.

There might be one or two or twenty constitutional issues with that...

One more of the innumerable costs of that stellar policy success known as The War On Drugs...

[Econoline]

Liberty (and everyone else here, for that matter) - I really think you ought to click on the link and read the rest of that interview. David Simon knows what he's talking about and doesn't hesitate to name names.




ETA: (Oh, BTW...if you're responding to part of a post here you really don't have to quote the whole post: it's easy just to delete all but that part of the post which you're responding to.)

[Econoline]

Why are you doing this? You don't actually like people.

Really, rube, you ought to go down to the local cineplex and apply for a job; you'd probably be able to handle the projection needs for all 20 theaters. You're that good.

Just sayin'...

[Lord Jim]

[liberty]

Liberty (and everyone else here, for that matter) - I really think you ought to click on the link and read the rest of that interview. David Simon knows what he's talking about and doesn't hesitate to name names.




ETA: (Oh, BTW...if you're responding to part of a post here you really don't have to quote the whole post: it's easy just to delete all but that part of the post which you're responding to.)

I read it. Preposterous, everyone knows that you can trust everyone in government, especially Democrats.

[Econoline]

Bumping this thread up with an excellent article on police racism and police corruption, by a black ex-cop:

For you "TL;DR" folks...you should at least read this one paragraph:

When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as "anti-cop." It is not.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/ra ... ce-officer

I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
by Redditt Hudson on May 28, 2015

On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.

That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was recently acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, "fearing for his life," he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.

Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a "pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force."

Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from last year asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.

Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.

1) There are officers who willfully violate the human rights of the people in the communities they serve
As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.

2) The bad officers corrupt the departments they work for
About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.

The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit. One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.

The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words "and officers under his command." Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers "under the command" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.

3) The mainstream media helps sustain the narrative of heroism that even corrupt officers take refuge in
This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are "totally wrong — just not true." The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of "very small incidents" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.

The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.

Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.

When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as "anti-cop." It is not.

4) Cameras provide the most objective record of police-citizen encounters available
When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina earlier this year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.

Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.

5) There are officers around the country who want to address institutional racism
The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.

Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several NYPD officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.

These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.

Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.

Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers. We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.

(BTW, I didn't include the links contained within the text of the original article; you'll have to click on the link above the quote in order to see those.)

[Gob]

2 a day?!??!!?

Data collected by the Washington Post newspaper suggests that the number of people shot by US police is twice as high as official figures claim.

The paper said that during the first five months of this year, 385 people - more than two a day - were killed.
The number of black people was disproportionately high among the victims, especially unarmed ones.

Official statistics rely on self-reported figures from law enforcement agencies.
They suggest about 400 people have been killed each year since 2008.

The US has seen a number of controversial cases where unarmed black people have been killed by white police officers.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32950383

[rubato]

I love satire.

Really? as much as you love yourself?


yrs,
rubato

[BoSoxGal]

LEO agencies don't even have to report police shootings - they do so voluntarily if at all. Even under FOIA it's difficult to access confidential criminal justice records, so who really knows? It is reprehensible that these records aren't subject to independent local or federal oversight and full public transparency.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I love satire.

Really? as much as you love yourself?
yrs,
rubato

Another bad weekend?

[liberty]

You all act as if police abuse is uniquely an American problem. It is a human problem and exist all overt the world. Based on what I have heard on BBC some of the worse case are in Africa and South America. It is simple people: All government is dangerous because government involves people with power. When people have power over other people some people will abuse that power. It just goes to show how brilliant the founders of our nation were. The answer is not to empower the thugs but ensure the police act accord to a proper code of conduct.

http://www.msn.com/?cobrand=acer13.msn. ... &pc=MAARJS


When police officers who rape, sexually assault or harass vulnerable victims do reach the court system, phrases such as abuse of power and breach of trust ring out from the judicial benches.
Judges and prosecutors have pronounced over the past four years upon the "rarity and exceptional nature" of these crimes by police officers. A senior crown prosecutor expressed that view, for instance, last year in connection with Mark Wilkie, a Bedfordshire constable who was jailed for 40 months last August for trawling the police computer system to access details of victims of domestic violence and teenage runaways.
The then 51-year-old officer sent the women and young girls hundreds of menacing and sexually explicit messages – adding a threat that he would be watching them.
Wilkie pleaded guilty at Cambridge crown court to 12 counts of misconduct in public office and one count of theft.

[MajGenl.Meade]

"The then 51-year-old (Wilkie) sent . . . young girls hundreds of menacing and sexually explicit messages – adding a threat that he would be watching them"

Wilkiepaedia?

[liberty]

Sometimes bad stuff happens for stupid reasons. Did this guy think that he did not run the risk of being shoot if he attacked the cop? Or perhaps he thought it was an opportunity for his Family to win a large court judgment. Or perhaps he didn’t think at all..

Video shows Oklahoma assistant pastor pushing patrolman before fatal shooting

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/video- ... cid=AARDHP

Nehemiah Blessed Fischer may have been named after a prophet, but he died in less than holy circumstances.
A video released Monday by Oklahoma Highway Patrol shows Fischer, an associate pastor at a local Tulsa church, pushing a trooper moments before he was shot on Friday.
For authorities, the video is proof that Fischer started the scuffle that ended in his death. For the Fischer family, it’s an uncomfortable but unavoidable epitaph to an otherwise “god-fearing man.”
And for everyone else, it’s a reminder of the dramatic impact of video cameras on law enforcement at a time of increased scrutiny of police shootings around the country.
[Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide]
Fischer died Friday night on a country road about 20 miles outside of Tulsa. He and his older brother, Brandon, had been fishing and doing repairs on their father’s farm when heavy rains caused waist-high flash floods. The brothers’ truck became stuck in a ditch. When someone, perhaps a passerby, called police, two highway patrolmen responded to the scene to help.
But what was supposed to be a roadside rescue quickly became a fatal altercation.
[A tragic end to a ‘blessed life after Okla. roadside rescue goes wrong]
Officials claimed that Fischer, upset over being ordered to leave the truck behind, had attacked the officer. “As they were exiting the water, coming towards the troopers, a confrontation occurred and one of the troopers was actually assaulted,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol Capt. Paul Timmons told CNN Sunday. “And in defense of himself, he fired.”
The family responded with disbelief.
“Neither of them would ever attack or hurt anyone,” said cousin Anthony Fischer in an online message to The Washington Post Sunday. “The cops are covering up evil, and they will be found out.”
“He would not be one to disrespect them or go after [the troopers],” Fischer’s wife, Laura, said Sunday before calling on officials to release dashcam footage of the incident.
But that footage appears to show otherwise.
Capt. Timmons played a short segment of the 30-minute tape for reporters on Monday. The 40-second clip shows patrolmen Michael Taylor and Mark Southall calling for the two brothers to exit the water and clapping their hands.
“Come on out!” one of the officers shouts repeatedly. “Get out of the water. Let’s go!”
Suddenly, the brothers emerge from the darkness into the squad car headlights. It doesn’t appear as if the squad car’s flashing lights are on, one of several reasons why the Fischer family says Nehemiah and Brandon might not have known it was a state trooper shouting at them.
But as the brothers walk up to the patrolmen, one of the officers does identify himself. “Boys, state troopers,” he says. From the video tape, it sounds as if the brothers are talking back to the troopers.
“Settle down, do you hear me?” the officer says. “Settle down.”
The situation escalates in an instant as Nehemiah Fischer, a powerfully built 35-year-old, charges towards the shouting officer and appears to grab him.
“Get on the ground motherf—–!” someone shouts.
“Get him wet!” someone else yells, possibly Brandon Fischer encouraging his brother. (The troopers are seen parked on the dry road while the brothers are soaked from working in the flooded ditch.)
Nehemiah Fischer and the officer tumble out of sight. Seconds later, as the other officer points his gun at Brandon, gunshots ring out. The second officer can be seen scrambling around the squad car, presumably to assist his colleague.
Capt. Timmons said Monday that an investigation into the incident is ongoing and that his department would release the rest of the footage upon formal request, according to local TV station KJRH. The two officers have been placed on administrative leave, per department policy in instances of shootings.
Officials say the video is evidence that the troopers responded appropriately to an assault against them.
“There is no controversy about this,” Gary J. James, an attorney representing Oklahoma troopers, told The Washington Post in an e-mail. “[It’s] all on video and audio from both state troopers vehicles.”
[Officials: Man, shot killed by police shoved trooper]
Family members declined to discuss the video on Monday, directing questions to attorney Allen M. Smallwood, who could not be reached for comment.
Despite the release of the video segment, there is still plenty of debate over the shooting. Commenters on KJRH’s story went back and forth over who was to blame.
“[The] officer clearly aggressively steps towards the young men escalating a situation where a reasonable person could use force necessary to repel the assault by the trooper,” wrote one commenter. “The trooper goads the man in a tragic situation where they could have saved his vehicle. Instead the officer chose to goad and mock him refusing assistance.”
“Why is the OHP ordering them out of ankle-knee deep water in the first place?” asked another commenter. “It didn’t look life-threatening. The only real danger in this situation is the OHP.”
“You do realize they were drunk & not obeying the officers to begin with,” replied someone else, referencing Brandon’s arrest for public intoxication. (Officials have not yet released a toxicology report on Nehemiah).
That prompted a sarcastic response from a fourth commenter.
“Yes, killing him was the only way to save him.”

[Gob]

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 on Wednesday, according to a Guardian investigation, after two young black men were shot dead in New York City and Cincinnati.



Isiah Hampton, 19, was fatally shot by New York police department officers at an apartment building in the Bronx on Wednesday morning, according to police chiefs. His death followed that of Quandavier Hicks, 22, during a confrontation with Cincinnati officers at a house on Tuesday night.

Their names were added to The Counted, a project by the Guardian to report and crowd-source names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year.


The federal government does not currently keep a comprehensive record of people killed by police. Instead the FBI runs a voluntary program to submit numbers of “justified homicides”.

The updated findings on fatalities so far this year means that the total is on track to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2015 – and that people are being killed by officers at more than twice the rate most recently detected by the much-criticised FBI system, which recorded 461 killed in 2013.

While the number of African Americans killed by police so far in 2015 has been disproportionately high, both white and Hispanic/Latino Americans now make up proportions of those killed that are smaller than their shares of the general US public.

Among the first 500 deaths, 49.6% of people were white, 28.2% were black and 14.8% were Hispanic/Latino. According to the 2013 census, the US population is 62.6% white, 13.2% black and 17.1% Hispanic/Latino.

[Lord Jim]

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 on Wednesday

Of course that number by itself is completely meaningless, since it tells us nothing about the individual circumstances involved.

[Beer Sponge]

Peoples lives are meaningless Jim?

[wesw]

I have found that most studies are worthless.....

[liberty]

In a country of 300 000 000 it probably happens all the time:


Police Killed An Unarmed White Man In Iowa And His Community Didn't Seem To Notice


POLICE CAR TAPE  © Tony Webster/Flickr POLICE CAR TAPE
A few minutes before Des Moines police killed Ryan Keith Bolinger Tuesday night, the 28-year-old white man was dancing in the street, according to an officer. Police didn't find the display funny. In a news conference Wednesday, Des Moines Police Sgt. Jason Halifax said Bolinger had earlier pulled up beside the squad car of an officer who was conducting an unrelated traffic stop, parking his 2000 Lincoln sedan so close that he blocked the police cruiser's driver's side door. Bolinger then left his vehicle and danced around before getting back in and driving away.

Officer Vanessa Miller, a seven-year veteran of the force, gave pursuit, following Bolinger in a low-speed chase that hovered around the 35 miles-per-hour limit, officials said. The Des Moines Register reports that Officer Ian Lawler, who had earlier been boxed in by Bolinger, radioed that he was joining Miller in the pursuit. He also suggested that they may be dealing with a drunk or mentally ill suspect.

About two minutes into the chase, Miller cut Bolinger off as he attempted to make a U-turn, forcing his car to a stop. Bolinger exited his vehicle and approached Miller's squad car "walking with a purpose," Halifax said. As he advanced, Miller, who is white, fired a single bullet through her rolled up driver's side window, shattering the glass and striking Bolinger in the torso. He later died from the gunshot wound at a local hospital.

Halifax has said Bolinger was unarmed, and the Register reports that he had no criminal record. It remains unclear why he was behaving erratically. Halifax said he expects the case will eventually be considered by a grand jury, though in the meantime, the Des Moines Police Department is conducting its own investigation. While Miller was equipped with a microphone that should have picked up audio of the confrontation, her vehicle's dashboard camera didn't record the shooting, Halifax said. His officers are not yet equipped with body cameras, though in Miller's case, such a camera may not have provided useful footage, depending on her position at the time of the shooting.

The incident comes as much of the nation's attention remains focused on the issue of police killings and accountability, especially since the fatal shooting of black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. Bolinger's death was one of a string of officer-involved shootings this week that brought the total number of people killed by police nationwide to more than 500 so far this year, according to data compiled by The Guardian. At least two more people have been killed since Bolinger died.
Much of the grassroots outcry around the issue of police violence has been organized under the Black Lives Matter umbrella, as protests surrounding the killings of black men and women -- and the subsequent decisions not to charge, much less convict, the officers responsible for those deaths -- have arisen around the nation. Data shows that black Americans, particularly young black men, face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than their non-black peers. The Guardian's reporting supports that finding, showing that 28.2 percent of all people killed by police this year have been black, despite making up just 13.2 percent of the population.

So how do white people in Iowa respond when police kill a white person under questionable circumstances in a heavily white neighborhood? If Des Moines is any example, they don't: A single protester showed up outside the police press conference on Wednesday, according to the Register. There was no wall-to-wall media coverage of large-scale demonstrations, because there were no demonstrations to cover.

The city's apparent apathy is about more than racial demographics. Iowa generally has little experience with fatal police shootings. Bolinger is only the third person killed by police in the state in 2015, according to The Guardian. One was an armed robbery suspect killed after allegedly pointing a gun at police following a car chase. The other was a woman reportedly killed by an errant bullet fired by an officer who slipped while attempting to shoot a dog that had jumped on him. Both were white. (For comparison, the Los Angeles Police Department alone has killed more than three times Iowa's total so far this year, which speaks to longstanding concerns about the LAPD's use of force.)

Unlike New York or Ferguson, sites of protests following decisions not to charge police officers in killings of black men, Des Moines is more than 76 percent white, according to Census data. And the state of Iowa as a whole is 92.5 percent white, nearly 30 percentage points higher than U.S. population, which is 62.6 percent white. But so was Bolinger, for that matter, and so were nearly 50 percent of all people killed by police this year, according to The Guardian.

Bolinger's death didn't happen against a backdrop of tension between law enforcement and the community -- a tension that, in other places, forms an essential part of the Black Lives Matter message. But the outcome of his shooting is ultimately the same: an unarmed person is dead under circumstances that appear unnecessary and perhaps even avoidable.

While Black Lives Matter indeed focuses on the black experience, Bolinger's death underscores that many of the issues at the movement's core apply to people of all races. Many of the changes activists are championing would benefit all communities.
This point is all too often lost on white critics of the Black Lives Matter movement. But it's time for all people, in any community touched by a police killing, to wake up.

Though Des Moines has not felt the impact of police violence in the way many cities have, it hasn't been completely insulated from the ongoing debate over policing, nor from the racial narratives that have rightfully accompanied it. In May, a group of protesters gathered under the Black Lives Matter mantle in Des Moines, calling for police reform and increased accountability. Photos from the event show that a number of the attendees were white.

Amid the push for police reform and the broader reining in of the use of force, Bolinger's death is a reminder that while these issues affect some communities disproportionately, they can also affect any community at any time.