Police kill unarmed Black men but armed white gunmen live

By Frederick H. Lowe
NorthStar News Today

Robert Lewis Dear on Friday shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., killing three people, including a University of Colorado cop, a black Iraq War veteran and a mother during an hours long gun battle. When it was over police took the shooter in custody alive.

Dear, who was armed with an AK47 assault rifle, wasn’t lying on the ground with cops standing over his dead body, kicking him to make sure he was dead.

That’s not what happens with African-American men and boys. Police claiming they feared for their lives shoot and kill unarmed black men and boys.

The list of dead Black men and boys is long. Here are just three: Tamir Rice, a 12-year old who was murdered by Cleveland police while playing with a toy gun in the neighborhood park near his home.

In March, police shot and killed Anthony Hill, a 27-year-old Air Force veteran, who was naked at the time of his shooting death. Hill, who had served tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan, had been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, and was likely not taking needed medications.

Robert Olsen, a Dekalb (Georgia) police officer, said he shot the unarmed Hill because he started running towards him and ignored orders to stop. Olsen claimed he feared for his life even though Hill was unarmed. Hill served tours of duty in war zone, but he is killed by a cop in the United States.

There’s also an unarmed Walter Scott, who died after being shot multiple times in the back as he ran away from Michael Slager, a North Charleston, S.C., cop. The killing occurred April 4. Slager claimed he felt threatened by the fleeing Scott.

I am convinced white gunmen and white cops subscribe to a particularized tacit code of tolerance. White cops don’t feel threatened when a white a gunman shoots up the town, but a Black man walking down the street with his hands in his pockets — if in fact he is wearing clothes at all — is automatically considered a dangerous threat.

This article originally published in the December 7, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.