To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days. To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.
So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287. The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice." The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.' Will a Rural Town Listen?" And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context:
People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.
Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle. This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:
Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.
To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.
The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows:
Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.
“Say her name! Hannah!”
“Prosecute the police!”
Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.
Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.
Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):
It’s like pulling teeth.Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store. The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun. Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.
This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post: this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people.
And so the story raises the question: Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement? Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement? Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"? What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them? An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.
We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people. Here are some Tweets by journalists that I captured just after his comment:
And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:
The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:
Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.
Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.
“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.
“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”
Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.
Of course, what Trump said is technically true. So were the clarifications by the media. I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem. Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data. The media choose to highlight one or the other. In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common: both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct. Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.
I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other. Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for? Cross-racial coalition building, that is. It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others: Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse? wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?
It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference. But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption? Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?
On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.
I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town. That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.
The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts: the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services. Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says
the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.
More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.
And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources. I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand. One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources. In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else: hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.
It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide. Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:
Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.
* * *
Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.
The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election.
Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community? Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?
The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left: The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos." Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:
But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.