Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin activated the Wisconsin National
Guard on Sunday to assist local law enforcement following a night of violence in
Milwaukee that began hours after a police officer fatally shot a fleeing armed
man there.
Angry crowds confronted the police in Milwaukee on Saturday night, setting fires
and throwing rocks following the shooting that afternoon. One fire, at a gas
station in the Sherman Park neighborhood, burned unattended while gunshots kept
firefighters from extinguishing it. Other fires burned at an auto-parts store, a
beauty supply company and a bank branch.
One police officer was hospitalized with a head injury after a brick was thrown
through the window of his patrol car, Mayor Tom Barrett said at a news
conference early Sunday morning. The police reported just before 3:30 a.m. that
order was being restored to the area.
In a statement, Governor Walker praised volunteer clean-up efforts on Sunday
morning.
“This act of selfless caring sets a powerful example for Milwaukee’s youth and
the entire community,” he said. “I join Milwaukee’s leaders and citizens in
calling for continued peace and prayer.”
Mr. Walker noted that, under Wisconsin law, the shooting was being examined by
an independent investigation and asked that people give law enforcement “the
respect they deserve for working so hard to keep us safe.”
Mr. Walker said he decided to make the National Guard available to provide
assistance upon request after consulting with the mayor of Milwaukee and the
Milwaukee County sheriff.
Three people were arrested on unspecified charges during the mayhem, in which
crowds of at least 200 people filled the streets, said Assistant Chief James
Harpole of the Milwaukee police.
The shooting and protests come as communities across the nation scrutinize what
many see as excessive use of force by law enforcement officers, particularly
against black people. Protests broke out across the country last year after a
police officer in Madison, Wis., fatally shot an unarmed biracial man.
The race and identity of the officer and the man shot and killed on Saturday
were not immediately released.
Many of the protesters were black, and Alderman Khalif J. Rainey expressed the
frustration within the community. “The black people of Milwaukee are tired,” he
said. “They’re tired of living under this oppression.
“What has happened may not have been right,” Mr. Rainey said, “I’m not
justifying that, but nobody can deny that there are racial problems here in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that have to be rectified, because if you don’t, you’re
one day away.”
Crowd breaks widows of unoccupied squad near Sherman and Auer. Other squad set
afire and broken windows on another. pic.twitter.com/Jux2mJZYyQ
— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) Aug. 14, 2016
Three buildings in flames. Two stores & a gas station. #Milwaukee
pic.twitter.com/wrqd4xpYSY
— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) Aug. 14, 2016
The Saturday shooting came after more violence in Milwaukee. Five people were
shot and killed overnight Friday, Mr. Barrett said at a news conference recorded
by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier on Saturday. At least two of those
occurred near where the officer shot the man on Saturday.
The violence overnight Saturday erupted after an officer killed a man who the
police said was armed with a semiautomatic handgun and who fled after a traffic
stop.
The police said two uniformed officers stopped two people in a car at about 3:30
p.m. on Saturday. The police did not provide details on why the car was stopped,
though Mr. Barrett said the episode began when police spotted a “suspicious
vehicle.”
Both occupants ran from the car. During the pursuit, Mr. Barrett said, an
officer ordered the man to drop his gun and fired when he did not, striking the
man in the chest and an arm. He said the gun held 23 rounds.
The man, described by the police as a 23-year-old Milwaukee man with a lengthy
arrest record, died at the scene.
The handgun had been taken in a burglary in March, the police said. The officer
was not named, but officials said he was 24 and had been an officer for three
years. He was placed on administrative duty.
Mr. Barrett appealed to parents to keep their children off the streets in order
to restore calm in the neighborhood. “Parents, get your kids home,” he said at
the news conference.
Mr. Barrett said that the officer was wearing a body camera that he understood
to be operating and that the investigation into the shooting would be conducted
by the Wisconsin Department of Justice because the case involved a Milwaukee
police officer.
Correction: August 14, 2016
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Milwaukee
alderman. He is Khalif J. Rainey, not Raney.
Correction: August 15, 2016
A earlier headline with this article referred incorrectly to the man, later
identified as Sylville K. Smith, who was fatally shot by the police. As the
article correctly states, he was armed with a handgun, he was not unarmed.
Justin Porter and Lew Serviss contributed reporting.
BATON ROUGE, La. — A gunman fatally shot three law enforcement
officers and wounded three others here on Sunday before being killed in a
shootout with the police. The attack’s motive was unclear as of Sunday evening,
leaving an anxious nation to wonder whether the anger over recent police
shootings had prompted another act of retaliation against officers.
What was clearer were the waves of worry that rushed across the United States as
sketchy details emerged of a bloody melee Sunday morning on a workaday stretch
of highway in Louisiana’s capital — a city that had already been rocked by the
police shooting on July 5 of a black man, a purported murder plot against the
police that was apparently foiled and many racially charged nights of protest
and rage.
State and local officials speaking at a news conference here on Sunday afternoon
did not address whether the law enforcement officers who were killed and wounded
— three members of the Baton Rouge Police Department and three deputies from the
East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office — had been lured to the scene. Police
officials said the officers had responded to a call about a man carrying a gun.
Officials initially believed that other people might have been
involved in the attack, but the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police,
Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said at a news conference that it was the act of a
lone gunman.
Some details about the gunman began to emerge late Sunday: Officials identified
him as Gavin Long, an African-American military veteran. According to military
records released by the Marine Corps, Mr. Long served as a data network
specialist and was a sergeant when he left the Marines in 2010. He enlisted in
his hometown, Kansas City, Mo., in 2005, and was deployed to Iraq from June 2008
to January 2009, his records show. They also show a number of commendations,
including the Good Conduct Medal.
On a social media site registered under the name Gavin Long, a young
African-American man who refers to himself as “Cosmo” posted videos and podcasts
and shared biographical and personal information that aligned with the
information that the authorities had released, so far, about the gunman.
In one YouTube video, titled, “Protesting, Oppression and How to Deal with
Bullies,” the man discusses the killings of African-American men at the hands of
police officers, including the July 5 death here of Alton B. Sterling, and he
advocates a bloody response instead of the protests that the deaths sparked.
“One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors,” he
said, “have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. Zero have
been successful just over simply protesting. It doesn’t — it has never worked
and it never will. You got to fight back. That’s the only way that a bully knows
to quit.”
“You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like
the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did,” he added. “That’s what
Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to
sacrifice.”
Photo
East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy Brad Garafola. Credit East Baton Rouge
Sheriff's Office, via Associated Press
In one of a string of podcasts the man posted, titled, “My Story,” he expounded
on the recurrence of the number seven in his life. “My father was born in 1947.
My mother was born in 1957. And I took physical form on 7/17/87.”
Sunday was the man’s 29th birthday.
Around the country, political leaders, police officers and activists focused
their attention, and their mourning, on the slain officers. They also sought to
calm the tensions that welled up this month over the killings of black men by
the police and the retaliatory violence directed at officers, including the July
7 killings of five officers in Dallas, carried out by a black man who said he
wanted to kill white police officers.
Just last week, President Obama was in Dallas for a memorial service, and on
Sunday afternoon, he was at the White House, again addressing the nation after
an assault on police officers. He said the killings were “an attack on all of
us.”
“We have our divisions, and they are not new,” he said, noting that the country
was probably in store for some heated political speech during the Republican
National Convention this week in Cleveland.
“Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country
rather than divide it further,” the president said. “We need to temper our words
and open our hearts, all of us.”
Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said, “The violence, the hatred just has to
stop.”
Colonel Edmonson said a call came in to police dispatch early Sunday reporting
“a guy carrying a weapon” in the vicinity of the Hammond Aire Plaza shopping
center on Airline Highway — a commercial thoroughfare dotted with carwashes, car
dealerships and chain stores that cuts through a leafy residential neighborhood.
It is also about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters,
where protesters had held numerous rallies since July 5, when the police here
fatally shot Mr. Sterling, after a confrontation in front of a convenience
store.
On Sunday, around 8:40 a.m., law enforcement officers observed the man, wearing
all black and holding a rifle, outside a beauty supply store, the colonel said.
In the next four minutes, there were reports of shots fired and officers struck,
said Colonel Edmonson, whose agency will take the lead on the investigation,
helped by local and federal investigators.
Mark Clements, who lives near the shopping center, said in a telephone interview
that he was in his backyard when he heard shots ring out. “I heard probably 10
to 12 gunshots go off,” he said. “We heard a bunch of sirens and choppers and
everything since then.”
Avery Hall, 17, who works at a nearby carwash, said he was on his way to work
when the gunfire erupted. “I was about to pull in at about 8:45, and we got
caught in the crossfire,” he said. “I heard a lot of gunshots — a lot. I saw
police ducking and shooting. I stopped and pulled into the Dodge dealership. I
got out and heard more gunshots. We ducked.”
On the police dispatch radio, a voice could be heard shouting: “Shots fired!
Officer down! Shots fired. Officer down! Got a city officer down.”
Around 8:48 a.m., officers fired at the suspect, killing him, Colonel Edmonson
said.
On Sunday afternoon, officials said that two of the slain officers were Baton
Rouge city police officers, and that the third was from the Sheriff’s Office.
One city police officer and two sheriff’s deputies were wounded, including one
who was in critical condition.
The shooting was the latest episode in a month of violence and extraordinary
racial tension in the country. The night after the police shooting of Mr.
Sterling, who was selling CDs outside a convenience store here, a black man was
killed by the police during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb. The next night,
five police officers were killed by a gunman in Dallas.
Violence against the police, Mr. Edwards said, “doesn’t address any injustice,
perceived or real.”
He continued, “It is just an injustice in and of itself.”
Speaking at the news conference, the police chief here, Carl Dabadie Jr., called
the shooting “senseless” and asked people to pray for the officers and their
families.
“We are going to get through this as a family,” he said, “and we’re going to get
through this together.”
The police in Baton Rouge had in recent days announced that they were
investigating a plot by four people to target police officers, and they cited
the threat to explain why their presence at local protests, which had been light
at first, had grown heavy.
The police said a 17-year-old was arrested this month after running from a
burglary of the Cash American Pawn Shop in Baton Rouge. He and three others,
including a 12-year-old arrested on Friday, were believed to have broken into
the pawnshop through the roof. It was unclear whether the burglary was connected
to Sunday’s shooting.
Chief Dabadie told reporters at the time that the 17-year-old had told the
police “that the reason the burglary was being done was to harm police
officers.”
The explanation, however, was met with skepticism on social media sites, where
many people believed the report was concocted by the police to justify their
militarized response to the protests after the death of Mr. Sterling.
“That was bull — it was a scare tactic to calm things down,” Arthur Reed of Stop
the Killing, the group that first released the video of Mr. Sterling’s shooting,
said on Sunday. “And it worked. I ain’t going out there if people are going to
be out there trying to kill police.”
The intense protests had started to lose steam. Sima Atri, a lawyer who
represented some of the protesters who were arrested last weekend, said recently
that many protesters were afraid to hit the streets after the authorities’
aggressive approach last weekend, which included nearly 200 arrests. (Nearly 100
charges were dropped on Friday.)
A protest on Saturday afternoon attracted fewer than a dozen people, who huddled
on the side of the road under a tent to escape the blazing sun and flashed signs
at passing cars. They were mostly white; the protesters at large demonstrations
shortly after Mr. Sterling’s death had been nearly all black.
Louisiana has lately taken a harder line to defend its police officers, who this
year will become a protected class under the state’s hate crimes law.
The killing of the officers on Sunday occurred as hundreds of police officers
trained in crowd-control tactics braced for protests outside the Republican
National Convention in Cleveland.
Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, cautioned against
criticizing activists after the attack on Sunday in Baton Rouge.
“I think anytime that there’s a loss of life — black, white, police officer,
otherwise — it’s cause for us to take a moment and be sad about that life,” she
said. “And I think we have to be really careful about where these shootings of
police officers steer the conversation. I think it’s absurd to insinuate that a
movement that is doing nothing more than demanding that the war on black life
come to an end is in any way responsible for these police officers getting
shot.”
Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association,
has urged people not to bring their guns anywhere near Cleveland’s downtown
during the convention because officers are in a “heightened state.”
In Cleveland on Sunday, Steve Thacker, 57, of Westlake, Ohio, stood in the
city’s Public Square holding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle — allowed
under the state’s open-carry law — as news broke that several officers had been
killed in Baton Rouge. When asked about Mr. Loomis’s comments and the Baton
Rouge shooting, Mr. Thacker said that despite the attack, he wanted to make a
statement and show that people could continue to openly carry their weapons.
“I pose no threat to anyone. I’m an American citizen. I’ve never been in trouble
for anything,” said Mr. Thacker, an information technology engineer. “This is my
time to come out and put my two cents’ worth in, albeit that it is a very strong
statement.”
Correction: July 17, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated a part
of the service record of Gavin Long. He served six months in Iraq, not a year.
Julie Bloom and Richard Fausset reported from Baton Rouge, and Mike McPhate from
New York. Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder from Dallas; Rick Rojas,
Katie Rogers, Mike McIntire and Frances Robles from New York; Yamiche Alcindor
from Cleveland; and Christiaan Mader from Baton Rouge.
A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Attack on Officers Jolts a Nation on Edge.
DALLAS — President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned
with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he
implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might
not hold.”
“I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem,” Mr. Obama said at a
memorial service for the officers in Dallas, where he quoted Scripture, alluded
to Yeats and at times expressed a sense of powerlessness to stop the racial
violence that has marked his presidency. But Mr. Obama also spoke hard truths to
both sides.
Addressing a crowd of 2,000 at a concert hall, the president chided the police
for not understanding what he called the legitimate grievances of
African-Americans, who he said were victims of systemic racial bias.
“We cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as
troublemakers or paranoid,” Mr. Obama said to applause. “We can’t simply dismiss
it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your
experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps
even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church members again and
again and again — it hurts.”
But the president also turned to the protesters of the Black Lives Matter
movement and said they were too quick to condemn the police. “Protesters, you
know it,” Mr. Obama said. “You know how dangerous some of the communities where
these police officers serve are, and you pretend as if there’s no context. These
things we know to be true.”
It was the poignant speech of a man near the end of his patience about a scourge
of violence that he said his own words had not been enough to stop. Mr. Obama
spoke after a week in which the police killed two black men, in Minnesota and
Louisiana, and Micah Johnson, the Army veteran, killed the five officers in
Dallas.
“I’ve spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency,” Mr.
Obama said. “I’ve hugged too many families. I’ve seen how inadequate words can
be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have
been.”
He acknowledged that the Dallas killings — “an act not just of demented violence
but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy. He
said he understood if Americans questioned whether the racial divide would ever
be bridged.
“It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed,
perhaps even widened,” Mr. Obama said. “And although we know that such divisions
are not new, though they have surely been worse in even the recent past, that
offers us little comfort.”
Americans, he said, “can turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch
positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective
corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout.
We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold
and that things might get worse.”
But Mr. Obama insisted on holding out hope.
“Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair,” Mr. Obama said, adding
that he knew that because of “what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve
seen of this country and its people — their goodness and decency — as president
of the United States.”
He cited both the Dallas police and protesters as part of that decency. “When
the bullets started flying, the men and women of the Dallas police, they did not
flinch and they did not react recklessly,” Mr. Obama said. “They showed
incredible restraint. Helped in some cases by protesters, they evacuated the
injured, isolated the shooter and saved more lives than we will ever know. We
mourn fewer people today because of your brave actions. ‘Everyone was helping
each other,’ one witness said. ‘It wasn’t about black or white. Everyone was
picking each other up and moving them away.’”
Mr. Obama concluded: “See, that’s the America I know.”
A row of police officers behind Mr. Obama in the concert hall did not clap when
Mr. Obama spoke of racial bias in the criminal justice system, saying that “when
all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights
Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as
troublemakers or paranoid.”
But when Mr. Obama added, “We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too
little of ourselves,” the officers behind him applauded.
Law enforcement officials who attended the service broadly welcomed Mr. Obama’s
remarks.
“To me, this is one of his best speeches I’ve ever heard,” said Chief Warren
Asmus of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who saw the speech as a
milestone in the acrimonious national debate about policing and race.
“He started to build that bridge that I think hasn’t been built for a long
time,” Mr. Asmus said. “From what I heard today, I see it as a turning point.”
But Chief Terrence M. Cunningham of the Wellesley, Mass., police said that while
he liked much of Mr. Obama’s speech, he was concerned about the president’s
discussion of the shootings by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota, which
remain under investigation.
“It’s almost like he’s put his thumb on the scale a little bit,” he said. “Let’s
let the facts come in.”
Some protesters responded positively to Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“I liked his speech,” said Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation
Action Network, an activist group in Dallas that organized the protest the night
of the shooting. The president, he said, “did a good job” in a situation where
“both sides are mourning, both sides are hurting.”
Many conservatives were angry about a reference Mr. Obama made in his remarks to
gun control, when he said that “we flood communities with so many guns that it
is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even
a book.”
Three others spoke at the memorial, including former President George W. Bush, a
Dallas resident who said his city was not prepared for the evil visited upon it
on Thursday, nor could it have been. “Today the nation grieves, but those of us
who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” Mr. Bush
said. He said the forces pulling the country apart sometimes seemed greater than
the ones bringing it together.
“Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves
by our best intentions,” Mr. Bush said to applause. “And this has strained our
bonds of understanding and common purpose.”
The memorial was held in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, a cavernous
concert hall with a massive 4,535-pipe organ dominating the back of the stage.
Nearly all of the auditorium’s seats were filled, many with men and women
wearing blue police uniforms from places like Massachusetts and South Carolina,
and from towns throughout Texas, like League City, Huntsville, Robinson and La
Marque. They walked into the hall under a giant American flag strung from fire
trucks.
On one side of the stage, five seats sat empty except for uniform hats and
folded American flags to memorialize the five dead.
Gardiner Harris reported from Dallas, and Mark Landler from
Washington. Alan Blinder and John Eligon contributed reporting from Dallas.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama Consoles and Challenges a Shaken Nation.
This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our
nation.
After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by
police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights,
Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an
otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people. The Dallas police
chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about
the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill
white people, especially white officers.”
We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out,
without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without
resolutions that will satisfy.
There is so much loss and pain. There are so many families whose hearts hurt for
a loved one needlessly taken, never to be embraced again.
There is so much disintegrating trust, so much animosity stirring.
So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that
someone is somehow targeting them.
Friday morning, after the Dallas shootings, my college student daughter entered
my room before heading out to her summer job. She hugged me and said: “Dad, I’m
scared. Are you scared?” We talked about what had happened in the preceding
days, and I tried to allay her fears and soothe her anxiety.
How does a father answer such a question? I’m still not sure I got it precisely
right.
Truth is, I am afraid. Not so much for my own safety, which is what my daughter
was fretting about, but more for the country I love.
This is not a level of stress and strain that a civil society can long endure.
I feel numb, and anguished and heartbroken, and I fear that I am far from alone.
And yet, I also fear that time is a requirement for remedy. We didn’t arrive at
this place overnight and we won’t move on from it overnight.
Centuries of American policy, culture and tribalism are simply being revealed as
the frothy tide of hagiographic history recedes.
Our American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of
concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence.
Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too often,
aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing. Relationships
between communities and cops became strained. A small number of criminals
poisoned police beliefs about whole communities, and a small number of
dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces.
And then, too often the unimaginable happened and someone ended up dead at the
hands of the police.
Since people have camera phones, we are actually seeing these deaths, live and
in living color. Now a terrorist with a racist worldview has taken it upon
himself to co-opt a cause and mow down innocent officers.
This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are
tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be
able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a
societal wedge?
Will the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as selective,
discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives are taken, be heard
above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus for a cumulative argument?
Will the people who see both the protests over police killings and the killings
of police officers as fundamentally about the value of life rise above those who
see political opportunity in this arms race of atrocities?
These are very serious questions — soul-of-a-nation questions — that we dare not
ignore.
We must see all unwarranted violence for what it is: A corrosion of culture.
I know well that when people speak of love and empathy and honor in the face of
violence, it can feel like meeting hard power with soft, like there is inherent
weakness in an approach that leans so heavily on things so ephemeral and even
clichéd.
But that is simply an illusion fostered by those of little faith.
Anger and vengeance and violence are exceedingly easy to access and almost
effortlessly unleashed.
The higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral
justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong.
This requires an almost religious faith in fate, and that can be hard for some
to accept, but accept it we must.
The moment any person comes to accept as justifiable an act of violence upon
another — whether physical, spiritual or otherwise — that person has already
lost the moral battle, even if he is currently winning the somatic one.
When we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate,
rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way forward. But
we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple thing: Seeing every
person as fully human, deserving every day to make it home to the people he
loves.
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(@CharlesMBlow), or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.
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Instantly, shockingly, the murder of five police officers on duty
at a peaceful protest in Dallas has compounded the nation’s continuing agony.
The devastating attack wounded seven other officers and two civilians. In mere
hours, the carnage left the country with a wrenching shift: from grieving the
latest black victims of police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana to grieving
for the police officers slain so viciously in Dallas.
“It looked like an execution, honestly,” Ismael Dejesus said after witnessing
the assassination of a policeman, captured on video. “He stood over him after he
was already down and shot him three or four more times in the back.” Addressing
horrifying violence for a second time in two days, President Obama called the
murders “a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”
In the aftermath, possible motives will be ticked off for the killer and any
accomplices. But the police and protesters alike could only wonder what might
truly account for such a level of atrocity. The police quoted the main suspect —
Micah Johnson, a black Army veteran with service in Afghanistan, who was killed
after being cornered — as intent on killing white people and avenging the
innocent deaths of black citizens in police encounters elsewhere. “This must
stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” said Dallas’s
police chief, David Brown, who is black.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch touched on the sense of contagion that at times
seemed to be driving the deadly encounters. Speaking at the Justice Department,
she urged Americans “not to allow the events of this week to precipitate a ‘new
normal’ in our country.” Her plea was basic: “Turn to each other, not against
each other.”
A Dallas minister and organizer of the street protest, Dominique Alexander, said
the demonstration was entirely about peaceful change, not revenge. It was a
local protest, he noted, praising a police sergeant he saw running to assist a
civilian injured in the melee. The Thursday night march, one of multiple
protests across the nation, offered no early hint of violence. Police officers
wore summer shirts, not the SWAT team military gear that can antagonize
protesters. There was no warning that a sniper lurked nearby until shots rang
out and officers fell.
The streaming videos this time caught police officers, suddenly the prime
targets, instinctively heading toward the gunfire and shepherding panicked
crowds toward safety.
“The officers who were killed were probably walking with us to keep us safe,”
said DeKanni Smith, who was among the demonstrators. “I’m disgusted.”
Disgust may well summarize the nation’s reaction to such an appalling twist in
what seems to be a nonstop cycle of violence. As with the lives lost in
Louisiana and Minnesota, the murdered officers in Dallas now cry out to us for
something better, for a fresh and far stronger resolve to repair relations in
the cause of law enforcement and to stem the nation’s bleeding.
This editorial has been updated to reflect news developments.
A version of this editorial appears in print on July 9, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Country Drowning in Grief.
Dallas — On Friday, the city of Dallas was in mourning, and so
was I.
We lost five police officers. They were gunned down at a peaceful protest on
Thursday night that took place just a few blocks from where I live. I was at
that protest too.
So was my friend Angela. She stayed longer than I did, leaving right before the
shots rang out. “Peaceful crowd. Sprits lifted and prepped for action. Sad to
see it turn out like this,” she later wrote on Facebook.
Everyone is sad to see it turn out like this. The city planned a prayer vigil
for noon on Friday and I decided to go and maybe to stay until the end this
time.
I walked to Thanks-Giving Square, where the vigil was held, down a street lined
with police officers in their dress blue uniforms. They were pleasant to
everyone who greeted them. Some people took pictures. I took a photo of some
people posing with the police too.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, and others in the crowd expressed condolences
as well.
I imagine it feels, for the Dallas police, as if a member of their family has
died.
That’s how it felt for me, watching the terrible news earlier in the week,
hearing about Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile. And how it felt after we
lost Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and the long list of others.
I walked to the center of the square and stood on the steps next to a man
dressed in a business suit. It was hot — 96 degrees. I drank a bottle of water
but he didn’t open his. The speakers, seemingly every dignitary and politician
from the area, were lined up under a circular plaque that read: “Come into his
courts with praise. Psalm 100.” We bowed our heads in prayer.
“Were you there last night?” I whispered to the man in the suit.
“Yeah, I am one of the organizers. I’m James.”
We whispered back and forth to each other between and during the speeches.
“The crowd is different today,” he said.
I nodded. There were many more people, maybe 1,000. It appeared as if the
majority of them were white. The atmosphere was different. The voice of Black
Lives Matter had become a silent whisper between James and me.
“They’re blaming us,” he said.
At one point, a speaker said the answer was to love one another. The speaker
said, I want everybody here to find someone in the crowd who is different from
you and shake his hand and give him a hug.
James and I exchanged glances. Several white people were lined up against the
wall to my left. They hugged each other as they clasped hands. A few of them
looked at me, and I awkwardly shook their hands and hugged them. I didn’t see
James hug anyone, and I wished that I hadn’t either. My Southern politeness
kicked in, even though I always find a forced hug uncomfortable.
During the vigil, a parade of dignitaries spoke: preachers of every faith, City
Council members, the police chief. Friday belonged to the city officials and the
necessary public mourning. But Thursday night, before the shooting, the Black
Lives Matter protests belonged to us, the people who were mourning two senseless
deaths at the hands of the police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
The police chief, David Brown, took his turn speaking. He was the hero of the
hour. He had captured the villain who killed his officers. He was proud of his
accomplishments and the audience was moved by his speech. He told us how most of
the time, wearing the police uniform in Dallas, he hears negative comments and
gets complaints. But it felt good today, it gave him some measure of comfort, to
hear the words: “Thank you.”
The crowd then spontaneously shouted, “Thank you.”
The chant went through the crowd, all of us who had found someone different from
us to hug: “Thank you.”
The chant that resonated more with me was from Thursday night.
“Enough is enough,” the crowd chanted. “Enough is enough,” I chanted along too,
with the call and response, standing on the edge of the park just a few blocks
from my home.
I had gone to the protest that night not only to show respect for the deceased
and their families but for myself, for my well-being. It’s similar to the reason
we attend funerals. I wanted to be with the bereaved so that we could lift up
each other.
People young and old, black, white, Latino, were taking a stand in Dallas on
Thursday night. One little boy had a sign pinned to his back with a quotation
from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on it. Police officers and citizens
talked and took selfies. The speakers stepped to the microphone, one by one, to
speak about the horrific deaths in Louisiana and Minnesota. Their volume rose as
they spoke about hope, and they finished with chants — “Enough is enough”; “No
more 404,” the police code when something like this happens; “Black lives
matter.” I clapped and I chanted too. But whatever I had gone to the protest
for, I was feeling the opposite effect.
I decided to leave early, around 8, so I wouldn’t have to walk home in the dark.
Also my phone had died.
When I was home and plugged it back in, I saw a text from my friend Angela. She
told me to turn on the news.
I watched the cameras broadcasting images of the park where I had just been
standing, the police officers who had been posing for selfies now under attack.
How could the peaceful demonstration I had been a part of turned to this?
I live two blocks from Baylor Hospital and I heard sirens going back and forth
all night.
I was at the protest Thursday night to be lifted up out of my sadness. “Enough
is enough,” we chanted. I added my voice. But it was not enough because within a
couple of hours five more people were dead.
Sanderia Faye is the author of the novel “Mourner’s Bench.”
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and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
THERE aren’t any ready answers for how to end this cycle of
bloodshed, these heart-rending images from Louisiana and Minnesota and Texas of
a country in desperate trouble, with so much pain to soothe, rage to exorcise
and injustice to confront.
But we have choices about how we absorb what’s happened, about the rashness with
which we point fingers. Making the right ones is crucial, and leaves us with
real hope for figuring this out. Making the wrong ones puts that possibility
ever further from reach.
So does a public debate that assigns us different tribes and warring interests,
when almost all of us want the same thing: for the killing to cease and for
every American to feel respected and safe.
We have disagreements about how to get there, but they don’t warrant the
inflammatory headlines that appeared on the front of The New York Post (“Civil
War”) or at the top of The Drudge Report (“Black Lives Kill”). They needn’t
become hardened battle lines.
“We have devolved into some separatism and we’ve taken our corners,” Malik Aziz,
the deputy chief of police in Dallas, said in an interview with CNN on Friday.
“Days like yesterday or the day before — they shouldn’t happen. But when they
do, let’s be human beings. Let’s be honorable men and women and sit down at a
table and say, ‘How can we not let this happen again?’ and be sincere in our
hearts.”
“We’re failing at that on all sides,” he concluded, expressing a sentiment
uttered by public officials black and white, Democrat and Republican, in laments
that drew on the same vocabulary.
Separate, divided: I kept hearing those words and their variants, a report card
for America as damning as it was inarguable.
Separate, divided: I kept seeing that in pundits who talked past and over one
another, in a din that’s becoming harder and harder to bear.
Separate, divided: I kept thinking of Donald Trump and how he in particular
preys on our estrangement and deepens it.
On Friday he didn’t, putting out sorrowful, thoughtful messages on Twitter and
Facebook and announcing his postponement of a speech on economic opportunity
that he had been scheduled to deliver. He was otherwise silent, and while that
was entirely out of character, it was wholly in line with the shock and
confusion that Americans were feeling.
Interactive Feature
Hillary Clinton wrestled with that confusion in an interview with CNN’s Wolf
Blitzer, stressing, “We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric.” Asked if and why
she’d be better at dealing with race relations than Donald Trump would, she
declined to disparage him. This wasn’t the moment for that.
We can’t keep falling into the same old traps. We can’t keep making hasty
conclusions, faulty connections. Predictably, there was a recurrence of talk
after the killings of five police officers in Dallas late Thursday night that
this was the fruit and fault of the Black Lives Matter movement and that cries
of police misconduct equal a bounty on police lives.
That was a willfully selective interpretation of events. It ignored an emerging
profile of the suspected gunman as someone who acted alone, not as the emissary
of any aggrieved group.
It ignored how peacefully the protest in Dallas began and how calmly it
proceeded up until shots rang out. Black and white stood together. Civilians and
cops stood together. Those cops were there precisely because they’d been briefed
on the demonstration and brought into its planning. They were a collaborative
presence, not an enemy one.
“We had police officers taking pictures with protesters, protecting them,
guarding them, making sure they was getting from one point to another,” Aziz
recalled.
And their instincts amid the gunfire weren’t to flee for cover but to run toward
its source and to hurry demonstrators out of the way. If we don’t pay full
tribute to that, we’ll never get the full accountability from police officers
that we also need, and we’ll never be able to address the urgent, legitimate
demands at the heart of the Dallas demonstration and others like it.
“We’re hurting,” Dallas’s police chief, David Brown, said during a news
conference on Friday morning. “Our profession is hurting.”
He’s black. So are many other officers on the Dallas force, a diverse one with a
good record. And he implored everyone to remember that these men and women, in
Dallas and elsewhere, “literally risk their lives to protect our democracy.”
“We don’t feel much support most days,” he continued. “Let’s not make today most
days.”
That appeal was all the more poignant for how it united police and protesters in
a desire that no sweeping, damning judgments be made about a whole class of
people; that such prejudice be resisted; that such cynicism be renounced.
We must be openhearted and coolheaded that way.
But we have to be honest, too, and not shrink from the ugliness laid bare by
technology and social media — by the footage of the police pumping bullets into
Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., on Tuesday and of Philando Castile bleeding
and dying beside his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, on Wednesday in Falcon
Heights, Minn. Over and over, Reynolds says “sir” to the police officer who shot
Castile and whose gun is still visibly pointed toward the interior of the car
where both she and her 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, sit. It’s a shockingly
intimate portrait of disbelief and helplessness.
On Friday morning, Reynolds appeared on CNN and insisted that her story not be
seen in isolation. “It’s about all of the families that have lost people,” she
said.
“This thing that has happened in Dallas, it was not because of something that
transpired in Minnesota,” she continued. “This is bigger than Philando. This is
bigger than Trayvon Martin. This is bigger than Sandra Bland. This is bigger
than all of us.”
She added that Friday was Dae’Anna’s graduation from preschool, that Castile was
supposed to be there, and that his absence would be hard on the little girl.
Reflecting on Castile’s death, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota asked: “Would this
have happened if those passengers would have been white? I don’t think it would
have.”
It’s an important question, a defensible guess, and we need to be able to hear
and express both without the instant commencement of political warfare, without
superimposing particular causes and constituencies over the narrative, as if
every new development and every next death were a bludgeon to be wielded.
There’s only one cause here: taking the appropriate steps — in criminal justice,
in police training, in schools, in public discourse — so that each of us goes
about our days in as much peace as possible. And the constituency for that is
all of America.
Among the important choices we’re making is whom to listen to. There are voices
out there — too many of them — that seek to inflame. There are others that
don’t. Three from Dallas stood out.
One was that of Mayor Mike Rawlings, who lamented how racial issues “continue to
divide us.”
“This is on my generation of leaders,” said the mayor, who is white. “It is on
our watch that we have allowed this to continue to fester, that we have led the
next generation down a vicious path of rhetoric and actions that pit one against
the other.”
Another voice was that of Erik Wilson, the deputy mayor pro tem of the city, who
is black. “No conflict has ever been solved with violence,” he told CNN. “It’s
always been solved with conversation. And that is something that we need to
focus on.”
And then there was Deputy Police Chief Aziz, who is also black. Referring to
nationwide instances of excessive police force, he said, “We should be held
accountable, and that is what we have a criminal justice system for.”
But of equal importance, he said, was “a real dialogue with the community that
we can no longer be separate. We can’t divide ourselves.”
Separate, divided: those words again. They’re our curse right now. Must they be
our fate?
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on
Facebook.
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and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 10, 2016,
on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Divided by Race, United
by Pain.
THURSDAY night in Dallas, a calm and peaceful protest was
shattered by a brutal precision attack against officers at the scene. Just
moments before, some of those same officers had been amiably chatting with young
families and others in the diverse group of demonstrators.
As the news spread that five officers had been slain and seven others, along
with two civilians, wounded, my colleagues in departments around Dallas
responded as if family members had been shot.
“My neighbor asked me, ‘Why are you crying? You said you didn’t know any of
those guys,’” one friend who recently retired said to me. “I don’t even know how
to explain to him how hard this hits me.”
Along with palpable grief, the most common reaction I heard was pride. Those of
us who couldn’t be there were glued to the television, watching officers charge
toward the gunfire, engage the gunman and protect civilians. We heard a radio
call for plainclothes officers to suit up in their body armor — many didn’t want
to waste the time.
For me, though, the pride was over more than just those acts of bravery; it was
over the commitment to professionalism, trust and respect by the Dallas police
that will allow the department to be as levelheaded in the aftermath of the
massacre as it was in the midst of it.
Friday morning, after our brothers were assassinated for being white and for
being officers, the word was sent out: more protests are expected, and we must
not interfere with them. And that is the way it should be.
Some might ask why there are no tanks or National Guard troops in the streets of
Dallas. One reason is the relationship that Chief David O. Brown has built with
the community. Since taking over the department in 2010, Chief Brown has worked
to get officers to reduce the tension when they confront suspects or other
civilians. Even as budget cuts have trimmed the ranks and increased stress on
the police, complaints about officers’ use of force have gone down, along with
assaults on officers and the crime rate.
Photo
A Dallas police officer responding to the shooting on Thursday night. Credit
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
The department has also been more open. Even as his officers fought terror in
the streets — the worst loss of life for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001 —
Chief Brown maintained his commitment to transparency, briefing reporters while
the bullets were still flying.
Last year, when a rifle-wielding gunman in an armored vehicle attacked the
Dallas Police Headquarters, officers live-tweeted the attack.
The department has also thoroughly reported all shootings involving its officers
and detailed how its officers have used force.
Such a ready release of information is an important way for police agencies to
make a deposit in the bank of community good will.
Demonstrators on Thursday night were protesting shootings by police in Louisiana
and Minnesota. Much is made of the body count of police shootings. Far fewer
people follow through to learn that, by the count of The Washington Post, 90
percent of the times when police officers shot someone, that person had had a
gun or knife, or had posed another threat.
Police officers and protesters are less far apart in their goals than we might
think, watching the local news.
The Dallas police and other departments in the area are being clear in our
internal conversations: We’re here to protect and serve. When we make mistakes,
we try to fix them. When we explain what we do to the public, the public rewards
us with trust.
And while Chief Brown has called for an end to “this divisiveness between our
police and our citizens,” let’s let the protesters have their say; let’s hear it
all. And maybe, if both sides listen, we can get somewhere.
Nick Selby is a police detective in the Dallas area and an author
of “In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Civilians.”
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and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 9, 2016,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
Police and Protesters Can Co-Exist.
The vast majority of interactions between police officers and
civilians end routinely, with no one injured, no one aggrieved and no one making
the headlines. But when force is used, a new study has found, the race of the
person being stopped by officers is significant.
The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across
the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not
be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than
whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even
when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
The report, to be released Friday by the Center for Policing Equity, a New
York-based think tank, took three years to assemble and largely refutes
explanations from some police officials that blacks are more likely to be
subjected to police force because they are more frequently involved in criminal
activity.
The researchers said they did not gather enough data specifically related to
police shootings to draw conclusions on whether there were racial disparities
when it came to the fatal confrontations between officers and civilians so in
the news.
The study’s release comes at a particularly volatile time in the relationship
between the police and minority communities after high-profile fatal police
shootings of African-American men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota prompted
widespread outrage.
Portions of the episodes, both captured on video and released publicly, have
intensified calls for police reform as many departments across the nation have
been slow to deploy body cameras or to mandate changes in officer training
standards after the high-profile deaths of a number of African-Americans at the
hands of police officers in the past two years.
African-American activists who have demanded greater police accountability since
the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., set off days
of rioting, said Thursday that the study was critical to the conversation, but
far from surprising.
“It’s kind of like, ‘Is water wet?’” said Aislinn Sol, organizer of the Chicago
chapter of Black Lives Matter. “But what we gain with each study, each new piece
of information is that we are able to win people over who are on the fence. The
evidence is becoming overwhelming and incontrovertible that it is a systemic
problem, rather than an isolated one.”
The organization compiled more than 19,000 use-of-force incidents by police
officers representing 11 large and midsize cities and one large urban county
from 2010 to 2015. It is the sort of data the Obama administration and the
Justice Department have been seeking from police departments for nearly two
years, in many cases, unsuccessfully.
The report found that although officers employ force in less than 2 percent of
all police-civilian interactions, the use of police force is disproportionately
high for African-Americans — more than three times greater than for whites.
The study, “The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force,” did
not seek to determine whether the employment of force in any particular instance
was justified, but the center’s researchers found that the disparity in which
African-Americans were subjected to police force remained consistent across what
law enforcement officers call the use-of-force continuum — from relatively mild
physical force, through baton strikes, canine bites, pepper spray, Tasers and
gunshots.
“The dominant narrative has been that this happens to African-Americans because
they are arrested in disproportionate numbers,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a
founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, based at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice. “But the data really makes it difficult to say that
crime is the primary driver of this. In every single category, the anti-black
disparity persists.”
The study found that the overall mean use-of-force rate for all black residents
was 273 per 100,000, which is 3.6 times higher than the rate for white residents
(76 per 100,000) and 2.5 times higher than the overall rate of 108 per 100,000
for all residents.
For those who were arrested, the mean rate of use of force against blacks was 46
for every 1,000 arrests, compared with 36 per 1,000 for whites.
The Obama administration has been nudging police departments to adapt
de-escalation tactics and to fix broken relationships with poor and minority
communities across the nation, which typically experience far more intensive
policing because of what are frequently higher crime rates.
But because police departments often refuse to release use-of-force data that
would illustrate such trends, the federal government has had a difficult time in
determining whether police departments are employing force less often.
The federal government cannot generally compel police departments to hand over
such material, and many local agencies say they do not require officers to
submit use-of-force reports.
Other departments say they lack the resources to collect such information, and
others acknowledge privately that they fear that the release of their data would
subject them to unwanted scrutiny from the public and the federal government.
But when the Justice Department has had the ability to review use-of-force
records, it has found evidence of abuse.
In Seattle, federal investigators found that one out of every five use-of-force
episodes had been excessive.
In Albuquerque, the Justice Department determined that most police shootings
from 2009 to 2012 had been unjustified.
Researchers for the center said Thursday that the compilation of the
use-of-force material after years of failed efforts to determine whether racial
bias was present represented a significant success. The data is so closely held
by police departments that the agencies that cooperated with the project did so
anonymously.
Though the 12 municipalities that provided data were not named, they represented
a large urban county in California and 11 cities spanning the nation with
populations that range from less than 100,000 to several million, with an
average population of 600,000.
The center said that given the diversity of the municipalities — six are
predominantly white, one is predominantly black or Latino, and five have
populations in which no single racial or ethnic group represents 50 percent or
more of the population — that the findings are likely to hold true for most
other cities.
Cameron McLay, the police chief of Pittsburgh, said his agency had been among
those to share its use-of-force data. He said use of force by his officers had
decreased in recent years, but acknowledged that there remained concerns about
disparities in use of force when it came to African-Americans.
“We are responsible for not just bringing down the crime rate, but for making
people feel safe in their communities,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
Study Supports Suspicion That Police Use of Force Is
More Likely on Blacks.
This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.
We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of
more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that
you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.
Like you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even
die the same.
But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at
a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they
will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death
on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a racial
crisis flares around us.
We close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men —
Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a
terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just
beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death,
nothing anyone would ever hope for.
A nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about
the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in
Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult
truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the reckoning
includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or
discounted.
In the wake of these deaths and the protests surrounding them, you, white
America, say that black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word
while we thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who
shoot to death black people who you deem to be mostly “thugs.”
That such an accusation is nonsense is nearly beside the point. Black people
protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what
goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in any
neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and
deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually murder
where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.
It is not best understood as black-on-black crime; rather, it is
neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If their neighbors were white, they’d get no
exemption from the crime that plagues human beings who happen to be black. If
you want interracial killing, you have to have interracial communities.
We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the
whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear
that story.
At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a
distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege;
they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that
exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the
encounter is over.
Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories,
about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t
be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it
into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down,
informally, from one white mind to the next.
The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think
you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we
sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think
we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence
that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty,
all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything
left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave
gratefully.
So you demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more
space in college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire
departments and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment
builds, and your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too
heavy for you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who
amplifies your most detestable private thoughts.
Whiteness is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.
If you do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe
what we say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us
for no good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the
black person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death,
a sacrificial one.
Terror was visited on Dallas Thursday night. Unspeakable terror. We are not
strangers to terror. You make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment,
a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from
us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or
breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste.
Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you
say, or not doing as you say fast enough.
You hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few.
Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them,
your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures
breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not
denounce the villains who act in their names.
Yet you do the same. In the aftermath of these deaths, you do not all condemn
these cops; to do so, you would have to condemn the culture that produced them —
the same culture that produced you. Condemning a culture is not inciting hate.
That is very important. Yet black people will continue to die at the hands of
cops as long as we deny that whiteness can be more important in explaining those
cops’ behavior than anything else.
You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I
write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you
are different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any
longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has
spared your reputations and not our lives.
You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with
ourselves, because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care
enough to stop those who pull the triggers. We do not know what to do now that
sadness is compounded by more sadness.
The nation as a whole feels powerless now. A peaceful protest turned into the
scene of a sniper attack. Day in and day out, we feel powerless to make our
black lives matter. We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives
should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front
of their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you from shooting hate inside our
muscles with well-choreographed white rage.
But we have rage, too. Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when
the tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our bodies with
high blood pressure, sicken our souls with depression.
We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We
cannot halt you; that is our curse.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, is
the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in
America” and a contributing opinion writer.
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and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 10, 2016,
on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline:
Death in Black and White.
St. Louis — I CRIED on Wednesday as I watched, like much of the
country, the horrifying video images from Baton Rouge, La., showing a black man
being shot to death, in the back and chest, after being wrestled into submission
by two white police officers. On Thursday, I woke up to the news of a black man
in Minnesota, shot by the police during a traffic stop. I am devastated and
infuriated.
Alton Sterling is dead. Philando Castile is dead. My son, Michael Brown, has
been dead for almost two years now.
Death isn’t pretty for anyone, but what these families now face is the horror of
seeing their loved one die over and over, in public, in such a violent way. They
face the helplessness of having strangers judge their loved one not on who he
was or what he meant to his family but on a few seconds of video. Mr. Sterling
died in a very lonely way, surrounded by his killers. Can you imagine a lonelier
death? Mr. Castile died with his girlfriend and her young daughter watching as
he was gunned down.
Sometimes it seems like the only thing we can do in response to the police
brutality that my son and so many other black boys and men have suffered is to
pray for black lives. Yes, they matter, but is that changing anything? What is
going to be different this time?
There is again an uproar, and people are going to once again do a lot of talking
about black-on-black crime versus white-on-black crime. Truth is, black on black
crime is perpetuated by systemic injustice and social ills. But, real talk, this
debate is meaningless so long as we still live in a world where a black man can
get killed for selling cigarettes on the street, where a black boy can get
killed for waving a toy gun.
It’s a problem when you look to the law as a protector and it comes into your
community and shoots people dead with no remorse or consequences. It is a
problem that you have some law officers trying to do the right thing, and then
others who bring shame on the badge.
Someone asked me what I would say to Mr. Sterling’s family, if I had the chance.
To tell the truth, I wouldn’t know what to say. When Michael was killed, people
tried to talk to me, but I was in shock; I didn’t know how to respond. I know
enough now to advise well-meaning people to pause before offering kind words. So
many told me, “I am so sorry for your loss.” After a while, all the “sorrys”
bled together, and at the end of it, nothing changed. Let Mr. Sterling’s family
members grieve with the people in their lives who knew him before everyone else
saw these shocking images and felt they had to put their two cents in.
The mothers I’ve met along the way — Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother;
Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant III’s mother — we’ve helped one another cope, and
we’ll try to do the same for Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile’s families. I’ll never
forget meeting Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice. I looked at this strong
woman and was amazed to think that she was just starting a horrible journey, one
that will never end, one that I am still on.
When their children are killed, mothers are expected to say something. To help
keep the peace. To help make change. But what can I possibly say? I just know we
need to do something. We are taught to be peaceful, but we aren’t at peace. I
have to wake up and go to sleep with this pain everyday. Ain’t no peace. If we
mothers can’t change where this is heading for these families — to public
hearings, protests, un-asked-for martyrdom, or worse, to nothing at all — what
can we do?
Since I lost my son to a police shooting, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve gone
to therapy, as have my other children. I’ve started a foundation in Michael’s
honor. I’ve campaigned in St. Louis to mandate body cameras on police officers
at all times. We cannot assume that justice will be done. So I will never stop
talking about my son or fighting for justice for him.
People will try to twist the words of Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile’s families
and turn them into something ugly. These men will be called “thugs” and much,
much worse. It’s already happening. Click on the comments section of any article
you read about their deaths, and you will be shocked by the racist comments of
people who insist — insist — that they obviously deserved to die.
So what would I say to their families? When you’re ready, and if you need me,
I’ll be there for you. But the people I would really like to say something to
are the ones who claim that justice will prevail. Whose justice? When justice
comes to the one who didn’t pull the trigger, that’s when I’ll believe you.
Lezley McSpadden is the author of “Tell the Truth and Shame the
Devil: The Life, Legacy and Love of My Son Michael Brown.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion),
and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Mothers of Dead Black Men.
Videos of two fatal shootings of African-American men have again documented what
appear to be almost casual killing by the police. They prompt the deepest shock
at what the nation has witnessed over and over again: a chance encounter with
the police and an innocent black life ended.
On Thursday night, a peaceful march in Dallas against the shootings ended in
violence when snipers on rooftops killed five officers and wounded seven others.
One suspect, who was killed in a stand-off with police, said he wanted to kill
whites, according to the Dallas police chief. This horrendous attack on the
police and the two killings this week demand sober reflection by the nation’s
political and law enforcement leadership.
Of the two videos, the first showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the
ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and
back at close range by police officers.
The second showed the death of Philando Castile, who was stopped for an alleged
traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police
officer. The video, which was taken by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was
sitting next to him in the car, starts seconds after Mr. Castile was shot. “He
was just getting his license and registration, sir,” Ms. Reynolds calmly tells
the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was
licensed to carry.
“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t
think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday.
“All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get
stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he
was just black in the wrong place.”
The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It
speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out
investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.
The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement
gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of
random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of
life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014
killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a
white officer in Ferguson, Mo.
After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government
there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice
investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens
were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system
that further exploited and victimized local residents.
Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have
continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with
the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago
officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of
17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later
indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by
law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil
Liberties Union.
Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses
has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities
have known all too well.
The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make
law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they
have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and
prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to
repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.
And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural
communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the
country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian
oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be
restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years
after Ferguson.
DALLAS — The heavily armed sniper who gunned down police officers
in downtown Dallas, leaving five of them dead, specifically set out to kill as
many white officers as he could, officials said Friday. He was a military
veteran who had served in Afghanistan, and he kept an arsenal in his home that
included bomb-making materials.
The gunman turned a demonstration against fatal police shootings this week of
black men in Minnesota and Louisiana from a peaceful march focused on violence
committed by officers into a scene of chaos and bloodshed aimed against them.
The shooting was the kind of retaliatory violence that people have feared
through two years of protests around the country against deaths in police
custody, forcing yet another wrenching shift in debates over race and criminal
justice that had already deeply divided the nation.
Demonstrations continued Friday in cities across the country, with one of the
largest taking place on the streets of Atlanta, where thousands of people
protesting police abuse brought traffic to a standstill.
Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, said in New York that there was
apparently just one sniper, though there were so many gunshots and so many
victims that officials at first speculated about multiple shooters.
Officials said they had found no evidence that the gunman, Micah Johnson, 25,
had direct ties to any protest or political group, either peaceful or violent,
but his Facebook page showed that he supported the New Black Panther Party, a
group that has advocated violence against whites, and Jews in particular.
Searching the killer’s home on Friday, “detectives found bomb-making materials,
ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics,”
the Dallas Police Department said in a statement.
Three other people were arrested in connection with the shooting, but the police
would not name them or say why they were being held.
In addition to the five officers who died, seven officers and two civilians were
wounded. The Police Department said that 12 officers had returned fire during a
wild series of gun battles that stretched for blocks.
After the shooting subsided, Mr. Johnson, wielding an assault rifle and a
handgun, held the police off for hours in a parking garage, claiming —
apparently falsely — to have planted explosives in the area, and threatening to
kill more officers. In the end, the police killed him Friday morning with an
explosive delivered by a remote-controlled robot, the Dallas police chief, David
O. Brown, said.
During the standoff, Mr. Johnson, who was black, told police negotiators that
“he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” Chief Brown said. “He said he was upset
about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white
people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white
officers.”
He refused to rule out the possibility that more people were involved, saying,
“We’re not satisfied that we’ve exhausted every lead.”
Mr. Johnson, who lived in the Dallas area, served as a private in the Army
Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015, according to records released by the
Pentagon. He was listed as a carpentry and masonry specialist, and served in
Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014.
The sequence of events this week provoked anger and despair, dealing blows both
to law enforcement and to peaceful critics of the police, who have fended off
claims that the outcry over police shootings foments violence and puts officers’
lives in danger.
“All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our
citizens,” Chief Brown said.
Just hours after President Obama, reacting to video recordings of the shootings
in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., spoke in anguished terms about
the disparate treatment of the races by the criminal justice system, he felt
compelled to speak again, this time about the people who attacked officers.
“We will learn more, undoubtedly, about their twisted motivations, but let’s be
clear: There are no possible justifications for these attacks or any violence
towards law enforcement,” he told reporters Friday morning in Warsaw, where he
was attending a NATO summit meeting, after speaking by phone with Mayor Mike
Rawlings of Dallas.
The White House said Mr. Obama would travel to Dallas early next week, at the
invitation of the city’s mayor. Later in the week, the president will host a
discussion between the police and community leaders to help find solutions to
racial disparities and ways to better support police, aides said.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who was in Washington, said that the week’s
violence had left many people with a justifiable “sense of helplessness, of
uncertainty and of fear,” but that “the answer must not be violence.”
“To our brothers and sisters who wear the badge, I want you to know that I am
deeply grateful for the difficult and dangerous work that you do every day to
keep our streets safe and our nation secure,” she said. To the protesters, she
said, “Do not be discouraged by those who would use your lawful actions as a
cover for their heinous violence.”
But William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police
Organizations, appearing on Fox News, said that there was “a war on cops,” and
that the Obama administration was to blame for appeasement of those who attack
the police.
The attack appeared to be the deadliest for law enforcement officers in the
United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
“Our profession is hurting,” Chief Brown said, calling the actions of his
officers nothing short of heroic. “Dallas officers are hurting. We are
heartbroken. There are not words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our
city.”
The shooting erupted just before 9 p.m., only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza,
where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. It cut short an
emotional but peaceful demonstration, unleashing chaos as terrified marchers,
including families with children, ran for cover, while police officers ran
toward the shooting, guns drawn and firing back.
“I grabbed my shirt because I was close enough, I thought I might have been
shot,” said Jeff Hood, a minister who took part in the march. “I was screaming,
‘Run, run!’”
Bystanders captured extraordinary video of the shootout on downtown streets,
with officers taking shelter behind patrol cars and pillars, and tending to
their fallen comrades, amid the boom of gunfire and the flash and glare of squad
cars’ emergency lights.
The violence struck near one of the city’s busiest districts, filled with hotels
and restaurants as well as county government buildings, and hundreds of people
spent much of the night trapped in buildings that were placed on lockdown.
The dead included four officers of the Dallas city police, and one from Dallas
Area Rapid Transit.
Jane E. Bishkin, a Dallas lawyer who represents five of the wounded officers,
said that they were expected to recover, but that one of them, a woman, had
suffered a serious injury to her left arm and might be disabled as a result.
After Mr. Johnson was cornered on the second floor of a parking garage,
negotiators spent hours trying to get him to surrender, Chief Brown said, but he
“told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill
more of us, meaning law enforcement, and that there are bombs all over the place
in this garage and downtown.”
“The negotiations broke down, and we had an exchange of gunfire with the
suspect,” the chief said. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and
place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”
The three other suspects were a woman who was taken from the garage and two
others who were taken in for questioning after a traffic stop, but they were not
providing much information, the chief said.
On Friday, a large part of downtown remained off limits to civilians as
detectives, and agents from the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives, combed through the sprawling crime scene.
Chief Brown suggested that the gunman had some knowledge of the march route.
“How would you know to post up there?” he said. “We have yet to determine
whether or not there was some complicity with the planning of this, but we will
be pursuing that.”
But Dominique R. Alexander, a minister and head of the Next Generation Action
Network, who said he had planned the march, said his group did not condone any
violence.
“I was right there when the shooting happened,” he said. “They could have shot
me.”
Manny Fernandez reported from Dallas, and Richard Pérez-Peña and
Jonah Engel Bromwich from New York. Reporting was contributed by Michael S.
Schmidt from Washington, Alan Blinder and Patrick McGee from Dallas, Mark
Landler from Warsaw, Julie Turkewitz from Colorado Springs, and Sewell Chan from
London.
A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Five Officers Killed as Payback, Chief Says.
IT is clear that you, white America, will never understand us. We
are a nation of nearly 40 million black souls inside a nation of more than 320
million people. We don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or
even die the same.
But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want the cops to kill us
without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the
world watches our death on a homemade video recording.
You will never understand the helplessness we feel in watching these events
unfold, violently, time and again, as shaky images tell a story more sobering
than your eyes are willing to believe: that black life can mean so little. That
Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile, black men whose deaths were captured on
film this past week, could be gone as we watch, as a police officer fires a gun.
That the police are part of an undeclared war against blackness.
You can never admit that this is true. In fact, you deem the idea so
preposterous and insulting that you call the black people who believe it racists
themselves. In that case the best-armed man will always win.
You say that black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word while
we thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who shoot to
death black people who you deem to be mostly “thugs.”
That such an accusation is nonsense is nearly beside the point. Black people
protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what
goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in any
neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and
deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually murder
where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.
It is not best understood as black-on-black crime; rather, it is
neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If their neighbors were white, they’d get no
exemption from the crime that plagues human beings who happen to be black. If
you want interracial killing, you have to have interracial communities.
We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the
whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear
that story.
At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a
distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege;
they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that
exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the
encounter is over.
Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories,
about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t
be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it
into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down,
informally, from one white mind to the next.
The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think
you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we
sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think
we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence
that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty,
all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything
left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave
gratefully.
So you demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more
space in college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire
departments and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment
builds, and your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too
heavy for you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who
amplifies your most detestable private thoughts.
Whiteness is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.
If you do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe
what we say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us
for no good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the
black person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death,
a sacrificial one.
You cannot know what terror we live in. You make us afraid to walk the streets,
for at any moment, a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to
snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes,
or compact discs, or breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too
abrasively for your taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or
being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.
You hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few.
Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them,
your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures
breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not
denounce the villains who act in their names.
Yet you do the same. You do not condemn these cops; to do so, you would have to
condemn the culture that produced them — the same culture that produced you.
Black people will continue to die at the hands of cops as long as we deny that
whiteness can be more important in explaining those cops’ behavior than the
dangerous circumstances they face.
You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I
write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you
are different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any
longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has
spared your reputations and not our lives.
You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with
ourselves, because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care
enough to stop those who pull the triggers. What else could explain the white
silence that usually greets these events? Sure, there is often an official
response, sometimes even government apologies, but from the rest of the country,
what? We see the wringing of white hands in frustration at just how complex the
problem is and how hard it is to tell from the angles of the video just what
went down.
We feel powerless to make our black lives matter. We feel powerless to make you
believe that our black lives should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from
killing black people in front of their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you
from shooting hate inside our muscles with well-choreographed white rage.
But we have rage, too. Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when
the tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our bodies with
high blood pressure, sicken our souls with depression.
We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We
cannot halt you; that is our curse.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, is
the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in
America” and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion),
and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
ST. PAUL — President Obama, reacting with the same horror as many
Americans to a grisly video of a bloody, dying man in Minnesota who was shot by
the police, begged the nation to confront the racial disparities in law
enforcement while acknowledging the dangers that officers face.
“When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our citizenry that feels
as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same,
and that hurts, and that should trouble all of us,” Mr. Obama said in a
statement on Thursday after arriving in Warsaw for a NATO summit. “This is not
just a black issue, not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we
all should care about.”
A few hours earlier, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota, who seemed shaken by the
video showing the man, Philando Castile, as he died, also pointed to the role of
race. “Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were
white?” he asked. “I don’t think it would have.”
The statements capped a wrenching day that started with widespread replays of
the extraordinary video of Mr. Castile’s final moments and the aftermath of the
shooting, which his girlfriend had narrated as they occurred live on Facebook.
There were demonstrations and a vigil for Mr. Castile, with appearances by
members of his family, in St. Paul.
But the shooting reverberated far beyond the state. In Dallas, gunfire broke out
Thursday evening at a demonstration, turning a vocal but peaceful rally into
chaos as two snipers shot at police officers, killing five of them, the police
said.
Mr. Dayton and members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation asked for the
Justice Department to investigate the death of Mr. Castile, 32, who died hours
after the department took over the investigation into the fatal police shooting,
also captured on video, in Baton Rouge, La. The governor said he had spoken with
White House and Justice Department officials.
But the department responded that for now, it would leave the investigation to
the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and would offer assistance.
The shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota follow a long string of deaths of black
people at the hands of the police — in Staten Island; Cleveland; Baltimore;
Ferguson, Mo.; and North Charleston, S.C., among others — that have stoked
outrage around the country. The encounters, many of them at least partly caught
on video, have led to intense debate about race relations and law enforcement.
Mr. Obama, in Warsaw, said he felt compelled to follow up a Facebook message
with a personal statement about the killings, though he said he could not
comment directly on them. “But what I can say is that all of us, as Americans,
should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated
incidents,” he said. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities
that exist in our criminal justice system.”
The president cited the nation’s tortured racial history and current statistics
on unequal treatment of the races. Sounding wistful, he said, “maybe in my
children’s lifetimes, all the vestiges of that past will have been cured.”
Mr. Castile’s deadly encounter with the police occurred Wednesday night at 9
p.m., in the small city of Falcon Heights, just northwest of St. Paul. The
graphic video showed Mr. Castile, who had been shot several times, slumping
toward the woman who was recording the scene. As she did so, her 4-year-old
daughter sat in the back seat and an officer stood just outside the driver’s
side window, still aiming his gun at the mortally wounded man at point-blank
range.
The video is all the more shocking for the calm, clear narration of the woman,
Diamond Reynolds, and the fact that she was streaming it live on Facebook. On
the video, Ms. Reynolds, who said Mr. Castile was her boyfriend, gives her
account of what happened, saying again and again that he had informed the
officer that he was carrying a gun, and that he was just reaching for his
driver’s license and registration — as the officer had requested — when the
officer opened fire. She estimated, at various times, that three, four or five
shots were fired.
“Please, Officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him,” she said. “You
shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and
registration, sir.”
Ms. Reynolds’s daughter appears several times in the video. Near the end of the
10-minute clip, as the two are sitting in the back of a police car and Ms.
Reynolds becomes increasingly distraught, the girl comforts her mother. “It’s
O.K., Mommy,” she says. “It’s O.K. I’m right here with you.”
Late Thursday night, Minnesota authorities identified the officer who fired as
Jeronimo Yanez. They said he is on administrative leave as the investigation
continues. Another officer who did not shoot but was on the scene is also on
leave.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office ruled Mr. Castile’s manner of
death to be a homicide, meaning he was killed by another person.
In a short statement, the medical examiner said Mr. Castile sustained multiple
gunshot wounds and died at 9:37 p.m. in a hospital emergency room, about 20
minutes after he was shot.
Mr. Castile had worked in the nutrition services department of St. Paul Public
Schools since 2002, and became a supervisor two years ago, the district said in
a statement. In recent years, he worked at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School,
which is part of the district.
“He was one of the softest-spoken people you’ve ever met,” said
Antonio Johnson, a first cousin of Mr. Castile’s. “This kid has never been in an
argument. You could try to argue with him, and he was so nonconfrontational that
he’d just laugh.”
Danny Givens, a nondemoninational pastor who said he was a friend of Mr.
Castile’s, said, “Philando was a very even-keeled man, good-hearted, personable,
smile would light up a room, eyes that just speak volumes of love.”
In its statement, the school district said: “He had a cheerful disposition and
his colleagues enjoyed working with him. He was quick to greet former co-workers
with a smile and hug.”
In the day after the shooting, Ms. Reynolds and her video supplied the only
public accounts of the lethal encounter. Officials said they could not offer any
details, though they did confirm that a gun — presumably Mr. Castile’s — was
recovered from the scene.
Mona Dohman, the state commissioner of public safety, who oversees the Bureau of
Criminal Apprehension, declined to say whether Mr. Castile had a permit to carry
a concealed firearm.
Mr. Dayton said he was struck by the fact that the video did not show officers
making any attempt to render first aid to the dying man, but that they
handcuffed Ms. Reynolds and placed her and her daughter in the back of a police
car. “The stark treatment I find just absolutely appalling at all levels,” he
said.
The video of the shooting passed rapidly among Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
users, becoming significant news online. The terms #FalconHeightsShooting and
#PhilandoCastile were trending on Twitter as news of the encounter spread.
Another day, another hashtag. You didn't deserve this, brother. You didn't
deserve this. #PhilandoCastile
— NE-YO (@NeYoCompound) July 7, 2016
Hillary Clinton wrote on Twitter: “America woke up to yet another tragedy of a
life cut down too soon. Black Lives Matter.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, Ms. Reynolds said that Mr. Castile,
had just come from having his hair done for his birthday when they were pulled
over on Larpenteur Avenue, a major thoroughfare through Falcon Heights, a
predominantly white and middle-class city of 5,500 residents. The two officers
who stopped them were from the nearby city of St. Anthony, which provides police
services under contract to Falcon Heights, One officer approached Mr. Castile,
who was driving, and said he had a broken taillight, Ms. Reynolds said.
“He tells us to put our hands in the air, we have our hands in the air,” she
said. “At the time as our hands is in the air, he asked for license and
registration,” which Mr. Castile carried in a wallet in his back pocket.
As he is reaching for his back pocket wallet, to produce his license and
registration, “he lets the officer know, ‘Officer, I have a firearm on me,’ ”
she said. “I began to yell, ‘But he’s licensed to carry.’ After that, he began
to take off shots — bah, bah, bah, bah, ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ But how can
you not move when you’re asking for license and registration? It’s either you
want my hands in the air or you want my identification.”
The video, some versions of which were reversed, making it appear that Mr.
Castile was in the passenger seat, begins with images of Mr. Castile, who
appears to be moaning and moving slightly, his left arm and left side bloody.
Ms. Reynolds, who uses the name Lavish Reynolds on Facebook, then pans the
camera to her face and says matter-of-factly, “They killed my boyfriend.” In the
background, one of the officers can be heard shouting: “I told him not to reach
for it. I told him to get his hands up.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, told CNN that she had taught her son to
be extremely cautious when encountering members of law enforcement. “If you get
stopped by the police, comply,” Ms. Castile said. “Comply, comply, comply.”
“My son was a law-abiding citizen, and he did nothing wrong,” she said. “He’s no
thug.”
She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”
Correction: July 7, 2016
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the beginning of the
video shot in Falcon Heights, Minn. It shows the aftermath of the shooting; it
does not show the shooting itself.
Matt Furber reported from St. Paul, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Christina Capecchi from St. Paul, Jonah Engel
Bromwich and Michael McPhate from New York, Gardiner Harris from Washington and
Mitch Smith from Minnesota.
A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
11 Officers Shot, 4 Fatally, at Rally Against Violence.
BATON ROUGE, La. — The Justice Department opened a civil rights
investigation on Wednesday into the fatal shooting of a black man by the Baton
Rouge, La., police after a searing video of the encounter, aired repeatedly on
television and social media, reignited contentious issues surrounding police
killings of African-Americans.
Officials from Gov. John Bel Edwards to the local police and elected officials
vowed a complete and transparent investigation and appealed to the city — after
a numbing series of high-profile, racially charged incidents elsewhere — to
remain calm.
“I have full confidence that this matter will be investigated thoroughly,
impartially and professionally,” Mr. Edwards said in announcing the federal
takeover of the case. “I have very serious concerns. The video is disturbing, to
say the least.”
Urging patience while the investigation takes place, the governor said: “I know
that that may be tough for some, but it’s essential that we do that. I know that
there are protests going on, but it’s urgent that they remain peaceful.”
Two white officers were arresting Alton B. Sterling, 37, early Tuesday after
responding to a call about an armed man. The officers had Mr. Sterling pinned to
the ground when at least one of them shot him.
The video of the shooting propelled the case to national attention, like a
string of recorded police shootings before it. The shooting has prompted
protests here in the Louisiana capital, including a vigil with prayers and
gospel music that drew hundreds of people Wednesday night to the storefront
where it happened.
C. Denise Marcelle, a state representative who recently announced that she would
run for mayor, made impassioned pleas that the crowd remain calm.
“This is not Ferguson,” Ms. Marcelle said. “This is Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
Sandra Sterling, an aunt who said she had raised Mr. Sterling, also called for
peace. “I’m mad,” she said, but added, “I’m not angry enough to hurt nobody.”
LaMont O. Cole, a city councilman, had some of the harshest words for the two
police officers. “Those two officers who perpetrated this brutal attack, and
then murdered this young man, are cowards,” he said.
The decision to have the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the F.B.I.
and the United States attorney’s office in Baton Rouge conduct the investigation
was welcomed by a lawyer for Mr. Sterling’s family.
“We’re confident that it won’t be swept under the rug,” said the lawyer, Edmond
Jordan, who is also a state representative. “I think people are confident that
justice will be pursued.”
Officials identified the officers as Blane Salamoni, who has been with the force
for four years, and Howie Lake II, with three years’ experience. Both were
placed on administrative leave.
A call to a phone number for Mr. Salamoni was answered by a man who said he was
not the officer, but who would not identify himself. “When all the facts come
out, they did what they had to do,” the man said, and then hung up.
Mr. Salamoni is the son of Noel Salamoni, a captain in the department who is in
charge of special operations.
Local and state officials endorsed the federal takeover of the case. “We feel it
is in the best interest of the Baton Rouge Police Department, the city of Baton
Rouge and this community for this to happen,” the police chief, Carl Dabadie
Jr., said.
In other cities with high-profile deaths of people in police custody, when local
law enforcement agencies have kept control of the investigations and
prosecution, they have often drawn intense criticism for their handling of the
cases.
There are multiple videos that may show the conflict with Mr. Sterling, in
addition to the one recorded by a bystander that has been made public, said Lt.
Jonny Dunnam, a police spokesman, at a news conference. Mr. Jordan, the family
lawyer, called on the police to release the videos, but Lieutenant Dunnam said
that for now, the department was providing them only to the federal authorities.
“We have in-car camera video footage, we have body camera video footage and
there is video at the store,” Lieutenant Dunnam said. Of the recordings from the
body cameras the officers wore, he said: “That footage may not be as good as we
hoped for. During the altercation those body cameras came dislodged.”
Chants of "Hands up, Dont shoot", outside of the Triple S store in #BatonRouge
#AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/hVCH02idbs
— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) July 6, 2016
At an earlier news conference on Wednesday, family members, elected officials
and civic leaders demanded to know why Mr. Sterling had been killed. Some of
them, including the local N.A.A.C.P. president, Mike McClanahan, called on Chief
Dabadie to resign.
Cameron Sterling, Mr. Sterling’s 15-year-old son, wept uncontrollably as his
mother, Quinyetta McMillon, delivered a statement.
“The individuals involved in his murder took away a man with children who
depended upon their daddy on a daily basis,” Ms. McMillon said, adding, “As a
mother I have now been forced to raise a son who is going to remember what
happened to his father.”
On Tuesday, a person called the police to report that a black man in a red shirt
selling music CDs outside the Triple S Food Mart had threatened him with a gun,
the Police Department said. Two officers confronted Mr. Sterling about 12:35
a.m.
Mr. Sterling had a long criminal history, including convictions for battery and
illegal possession of a gun, but it is not clear whether the officers knew any
of that as they tried to arrest him.
The graphic cellphone video shot by a bystander, which was released later in the
day, shows an officer pushing Mr. Sterling onto the hood of the car and then
tackling him to the ground. He is held to the pavement by two officers, and one
appears to hold a gun above Mr. Sterling’s chest.
At one point someone on the video can be heard saying, “He’s got a gun! Gun!”
and one officer can be seen pulling his weapon. After some shouting, what sound
like gunshots can be heard and the camera shifts away, and then there are more
apparent gunshots.
A second video of the shooting, filmed by the owner of the store and first
posted by the local newspaper, The Advocate, on Wednesday afternoon, showed the
shooting from a different angle. It also shows one of the officers taking
something out of Mr. Sterling’s pocket after he was shot and was lying on the
ground.
Witnesses have said they saw a handgun on the ground next to him. Mr. Jordan,
the lawyer, said Mr. Sterling’s relatives were not aware of him owning a gun.
Arthur Reed, the founder of Stop the Killing, the group that released the
cellphone video, said he saw a gun only after Mr. Sterling had been fatally
shot. The group, a mentoring program for youths, had heard reports on a police
scanner about an arrest at the store, and showed up to gather video for
potential use in a documentary about urban violence.
Mr. Reed said the group decided to release its video after he heard that the
police had accused Mr. Sterling of reaching for a gun.
“He never reached in the video,” Mr. Reed said. “He never did anything.”
William Clark, the coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, said that Mr. Sterling
had died at the scene from gunshot wounds to the chest and back. Lieutenant
Dunnam declined to say whether both officers fired their guns, or if either of
them used an electric stun device on Mr. Sterling.
Mr. Sterling’s name began trending on Twitter Tuesday night. In a statement on
the killing, Hillary Clinton said, ”Something is profoundly wrong when so many
Americans have reason to believe that our country doesn’t consider them as
precious as others because of the color of their skin.”
By Wednesday evening, the parking lot of the Triple S was jammed with protesters
and TV cameras. The protesters, young and old and nearly all African-American,
waved signs declaring that black lives matter.
Anthony Anderson, 62, a tour bus driver, and his cousin, David Jones, 60, who is
self-employed, said they had had enough.
“I just think it looked like there could have been another way to handle that
situation,” Mr. Anderson said of the video. He said that it seemed to him that
the police here had long been harassing black people.
The videos made just as little sense to Leroy Tackno, 60, the manager of the
Living Waters Outreach Ministry transitional housing center where Mr. Sterling
kept a small bedroom for $90 a week. He said that Mr. Sterling had never been
any trouble.
“I’m just trying to figure out what did he do,” Mr. Tackno said. “All he did was
sell CDs.”
Richard Fausset reported from Baton Rouge, Richard Perez-Pena
from New York and Campbell Robertson from New Orleans. Reporting was contributed
by Mike McPhate and Jonah Engel Bromwich from New York, Allen Johnson from Baton
Rouge and Timothy Williams from Washington. Alain Delaquérière contributed
research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Examines Police Killing in Louisiana.
The small Texas city of Katy was left shaken after a woman
fatally shot her two grown daughters and was then killed by a police officer,
according to the authorities.
Under different circumstances, in a different era, the story of a shooting and a
police confrontation on a street in a small city of 14,000 people might not have
drawn much attention, but this one became widely publicized over the weekend
thanks in part to the power of social media, where gun violence remains a
subject of fierce debate.
Law enforcement said that a deputy from the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office
and an officer from nearby Fulshear responded to reports of gunfire at the
family’s home in the suburb of Houston on Friday and found the two young women —
Taylor Sheats, 22, and Madison Sheats, 17 — lying in the street after having
been shot.
Their mother, Christy Sheats, 42, was standing nearby with a gun in her hand,
the authorities said.
When the mother refused to drop the weapon, the officer shot her once in the
chest, Sheriff Troy E. Nehls said.
On Monday, the sheriff’s office released more details about the shootings,
though a motive was not immediately clear. It said Christy Sheats had called a
family meeting, and when her husband, Jason Sheats, 45, and their daughters
gathered in the living room, the mother opened fire.
The daughters and the father ran out the front door in the 6000 block of Remson
Hollow Lane, and Madison Sheats collapsed, the authorities said. Mr. Sheats ran
to the end of a cul-de-sac, Taylor Sheats ran into the street, and the mother
followed, shooting her.
Christy Sheats went back inside to reload her weapon, returned and shot the
older daughter again, according to a witness. Taylor Sheats was taken to a
hospital, where she died.
The police found a .38-caliber handgun at the scene, the statement said.
Sheriff Nehls said that crisis intervention teams had been sent to the home more
than once in recent years over turmoil that seemed to revolve around the mother.
The statement on Monday said the police had responded to 14 calls to the house
since 2012, including for alarms. But the statement added that “legal
constraints” prevented the release of any further information, including 911
calls.
This is Madison sheats. We're told she went to seven lakes high school. She was
just 17 when she was killed #KHOU pic.twitter.com/2gyiVEEUjb
— Josh Chapin (@JoshChapinKHOU) June 26, 2016
The bloodshed on a quiet middle-class street in the city, which is about 30
miles west of Houston, left neighbors and the victims’ loved ones shattered.
This is Taylor sheats. She was just 22 years old. #khou11
pic.twitter.com/lfg6REg4AV
— Josh Chapin (@JoshChapinKHOU) June 26, 2016
Sheriff Nehls said Sunday that Mr. Sheats was “ having a very difficult time
with this.”
“They seemed to be an all-American family,” the sheriff said. “Then you realize
that what happens behind closed doors — you just don’t know.”
Catherine Knowles, a friend of Christy Sheats’s, told a local broadcaster,
KTRK-TV, that she had seen no indication of any trouble that could have made Ms.
Sheats snap. Ms. Sheats spoke proudly of her daughters, Ms. Knowles said.
“This is not the Christy that I know — it’s just not,” Ms. Knowles said. “I
thought it was the wrong person. It had to be.”
Taylor Sheats’s Facebook profile says she had studied at Lone Star College at
CyFair in Cypress, Tex., and indicated hopes of becoming an artist.
Madison Sheats was to begin her senior year at Seven Lakes High School in Katy
this fall.
A New Jersey mother was charged with endangering the welfare of a
child after her 6-year-old son fatally shot his 4-year-old brother while playing
with a gun, the authorities said.
Officials with the Essex County prosecutor’s office said the mother, Itiyanah
Spruill, 22, of East Orange, N.J., was arrested on Saturday and was also charged
with a weapons violation. Bail was set at $310,000, and she was being held at
the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark.
East Orange officials said the older boy had been playing with his mother’s gun
in the family’s third-floor apartment shortly before 11 a.m. on Saturday when he
shot his brother in the head. The younger boy died a few hours later at
University Hospital in Newark. Ms. Spruill was home when the shooting occurred,
the authorities said.
Thomas S. Fennelly, chief assistant prosecutor, said that the shooting appeared
to have been accidental and that the legal ownership of the gun was under
investigation.
The brother was released into the custody of a family member, he said.
A version of this article appears in print on June 27, 2016, on
page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Woman Charged After Her Son,
6, Fatally Shoots His Brother, 4.
In recent years, the AR-15 has become, simultaneously, one of
most beloved and most vilified rifles in the country.
It is no surprise why the gun is so reviled by gun control advocates. Omar
Mateen, the gunman in the attack this weekend on a gay nightclub in Orlando,
Fla., used a version of the rifle produced by SIG Sauer to kill nearly 50
people.
The military-style weapon has also been the gun of choice in several other mass
shootings: at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.; at a movie theater in
Aurora, Colo.; at a holiday party for county health workers in San Bernardino,
Calif.; and at the campus of Umpqua Community College in Oregon.
But the National Rifle Association has taken to calling the AR-15 “America’s
rifle.” Though the federal government does not keep track of exactly how many
AR-15s are in circulation, experts estimate that there are easily several
million in the nation’s rifle racks and gun safes — a huge number, given that
the gun, along with other so-called assault weapons, was banned under federal
law from 1994 to 2004.
The rifle’s extraordinary popularity can be traced to a number of factors,
including the ease of its use, its embodiment of a certain military glamour, and
the aggressive marketing of the gun industry.
The weapon was first built in the late 1950s by Eugene M. Stoner, a former
Marine and the lead gun designer at the ArmaLite Division of the Fairchild
Engine and Airplane Corporation. It was an unusual rifle for the era, made of
lightweight plastics and aluminum instead of traditional materials like wood and
metals. It also fired a .223-caliber bullet, which was smaller and faster than
the typical ammunition at the time.
Partly for those reasons, the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Robert S.
McNamara, purchased the AR-15 in bulk in the 1960s and, after renaming it the
M-16, turned it into the standard issue for American ground troops in Vietnam.
Around the same time, a civilian version of the rifle, which unlike its military
counterpart could not shoot automatically, also went on sale. Today, dozens of
companies produce their own version of the weapon.
“Back in the day, people called it the ‘plastic rifle’ because it felt like a
toy,” said Sam Andrews, the owner of Tier One Weapons Systems, a gun engineering
company in Eureka, Mo. “But that’s evolved. Now people realize that light can be
good.”
Because of its gas-operated system, Mr. Andrews said, the AR-15 has a fairly
gentle recoil. The weapon is also fast and accurate, he added, able to fire,
under capable hands, eight rounds in a second.
“The reason it’s so popular,” Mr. Andrews said, “is that if you bring a handgun
to a fight where there’s an AR-15 you’re going to lose. And it doesn’t matter if
you’re a 240-pound man like me or a 90-pound girl.”
Gun owners say that the AR-15 is used for hunting, sport shooting and
self-defense. The rifle is also easily accessorized with custom add-ons like
flashlights, infrared scopes and a variety of grips, and is called the Lego set
of the gun world. Its owners swap product reviews or share personal hacks on a
wide variety of blogs and online bulletin boards.
According to a 2010 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, AR-15
owners tend on average to have three different versions of the rifle and spend
more than $400 per weapon on accessories and special modifications. Though the
AR-15 can be bought as cheaply as $600, the average retail price was slightly
more than $1,000, the survey found.
This demand has been accompanied — some would say caused — by vigorous mass
marketing campaigns by gun manufacturers, which often refer to the AR-15 not as
an assault rifle, but as a modern sporting rifle. Groups like the Civilian
Marksmanship Program run well-attended target competitions each year that
attract scores of military veterans, one of the gun’s chief sales demographics.
“You’ve got lots of returning servicemen who knew the M-16 very well — how to
shoot it, clean it, take it apart,” said Jim Scoutten, the executive producer of
Shooting USA, a shooting sports television channel. “And when they come back, in
many cases they acquire the civilian version.”
The AR-15 is also heavily marketed to younger gun enthusiasts who are attracted
to the highly militarized, Special Operations culture that has become
increasingly prevalent in action movies and shooter-style video games like “Call
of Duty.”
In 2014, the Violence Policy Center, which advocates gun control, did a study of
the marketing efforts by the Freedom Group, one of the world’s largest gun
manufacturers. It found that many of the company’s advertisements used martial
images of men in tactical gear and slogans like “Built to Be as Tough as the
Job” and “Bravery on Duty.”
The study quotes an article in Shooting Sports Retailer, a gun industry trade
magazine, warning salesmen to be wary of certain first-time buyers. “Many of the
new shooters attracted to tactical guns for their first firearms purchase will
think that they know guns because they’ve played a lot of first‐person shooter
video games,” the article says. “Gamers inspired by ‘Call of Duty’ to purchase
their first gun will eventually discover that they have a lot to learn.”
But despite such admonitions, the gun industry has used the popularity of these
games to sell its products to “a youthful, aggressive, technologically savvy
generation,” said Josh Koskoff, a lawyer representing the families of Newtown,
Conn., in a lawsuit against the industry. In researching his suit, Mr. Koskoff
said that he found screen shots from “Call of Duty” of AR-15s that bear the
names of well-known gun manufacturers.
To Josh Sugarman, the founder of the Violence Policy Center, the manufacturers’
attempts to push the AR-15 among the younger set stem from a stark realization
about the future of the industry.
“The traditional gun-buying demographic — white males — is aging and slowly
dying off,” Mr. Sugarman said. “So they’re marketing the AR-15 to the next
generation as the new, shiny thing.”
WASHINGTON — When a young American man from coastal Florida drove
a truck packed with explosives into a hilltop restaurant in Syria in May 2014,
F.B.I. agents scoured his online postings and interviewed his contacts in
Florida in a scramble to determine who, if anyone, might try to launch a similar
attack inside the United States.
One of the people they spoke to was Omar Mateen, a young security guard from a
nearby town who had attended the same mosque as the suicide bomber and had been
on a terrorism watch list for incendiary comments he once made to co-workers at
a local courthouse. But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen
after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community.
That hopeful conclusion was upended in a bloody spasm of violence early Sunday
morning when Mr. Mateen fatally shot dozens of people at a nightclub in Orlando,
Fla., before being killed by police officers who stormed the club to end the
standoff. The horrific events at the Pulse nightclub left 49 dead and have left
family members, neighbors and federal investigators trying to piece together
clues about what might have led Mr. Mateen, 29, to carry out such unspeakable
violence.
The government investigation could take months, but an early examination of Mr.
Mateen’s life reveals a hatred of gay people and a stew of contradictions. He
was a man who could be charming, loved Afghan music and enjoyed dancing, but he
was also violently abusive. Family members said he was not overly religious, but
he was rigid and conservative in his view that his wife should remain mostly at
home. The F.B.I. director said on Monday that Mr. Mateen had once claimed ties
to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah — two radical groups violently opposed to each
other.
Investigators now face the question of how much the killings were the act of a
deeply disturbed man, as his former wife and others described him, and how much
he was driven by religious or political ideology. Whatever drove him to carry
out the shootings, his actions highlight the difficulty for the American
government in trying to address a new style of terrorism — random acts of
violence that may have been at least partly inspired by the Islamic State but
were not directed by the group’s leaders.
Unlike Al Qaeda, which favors highly organized and planned operations, the
Islamic State has encouraged anyone to take up arms in its name, and uses a
sophisticated campaign of social media to inspire future attacks by unstable
individuals with little history of embracing radical Islam. President Obama said
Monday that there was no evidence that the Islamic State actually directed
Sunday’s attack, which would make Mr. Mateen’s case part of a pattern of
domestic radicalization.
American officials have said that those under surveillance in the United States
for possible ties to the group usually have little terrorism expertise or
outside support, which makes thwarting an Islamic State-inspired attack less
like stopping a traditional act of terrorism and more like trying to prevent a
shooting at a school or movie theater.
The son of Afghan immigrants, Mr. Mateen was born in New York in 1986, moved to
Florida with his family in 1991 and spent his early years there in the Port St.
Lucie area near the state’s east coast. He made friends as a child at a local
mosque, and built friendships during slumber parties and basketball games, and
playing video games. He bounced between jobs in high school and college. In
court documents connected to a 2006 name change — from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar
Mir Seddique Mateen — he said he had held eight jobs in about four years,
including work as a grocer and as a salesman at a computer store.
He earned an associate degree in criminal justice technology from Indian River
State College in 2006, the year he began working for the Florida Department of
Corrections at a facility just west of Port St. Lucie.
He left that job six months later, and within six months he had found work with
G4S, a large private security company that has won large government contracts
for work both in the United States and abroad. He was assigned to protect at
least two properties during his years at the firm: PGA Village, a golf club, and
the St. Lucie County Courthouse complex.
Mr. Mateen had a home in Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast. On Monday morning,
a reporter told the police that the house’s sliding glass back door was open.
Officers went to the home and “discovered the door open, possibly by force,
creating suspicion of a burglary,” a police spokesman said. “Detectives will
follow up to determine if, in fact, it was a burglary.”
Mr. Mateen met his future wife, Sitora Yusufiy, on MySpace in 2008. Both were on
the site looking for love and eventually marriage, and she was drawn to him
because of his alluring and funny messages.
During an interview Monday at her home in Boulder, Colo., Ms. Yusufiy said he
seemed perfect — American enough for her free spirit and Muslim enough to please
her traditional family.
“This man was a simple, Americanized guy that was also from my culture. And, you
know, had the same religion,” she said. “So I was like, O.K., this could
potentially satisfy my parents.”
She moved to Florida, and they married in a quiet courthouse ceremony in 2009,
but the short-lived marriage was marred by violence and isolation, she said. She
had no friends or family in Florida, and Mr. Mateen preferred that she stay in
the house.
She said he sometimes returned from work angry and agitated, including one night
when she fell asleep on the floor waiting for him to return home.
“All I remember is being woken up by a pillow being taken from under my head,”
she said. “I hit my head on the ground and then he started pulling my hair.”
“He almost killed me,” she said. “Because he started choking me. And I somehow
got out of it and I tried to tackle him.”
She said that Mr. Mateen might have been gay but chose to hide his true identity
out of anger and shame. A senior federal law enforcement official said on Monday
that the F.B.I. was looking at reports that Mr. Mateen had used a gay dating
app, and patrons of Pulse were quoted in news reports as saying that he had
visited the club several times.
Ms. Yusufiy said that her ex-husband had told her that he frequented nightclubs
before their marriage, but that he did not tell her they were gay clubs.
The couple separated within a year, and in 2011 Mr. Mateen filed for divorce. In
the court filing, Mr. Mateen said the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” He
did not elaborate.
He came to the F.B.I.’s attention in 2013, when some of his co-workers reported
that he had made inflammatory comments claiming connections to overseas
terrorists, and saying he hoped that the F.B.I. would raid his family’s home so
that he could become a martyr.
The F.B.I. opened an investigation and put Mr. Mateen on a terrorist watch list
for nearly a year.
James Comey, the F.B.I. director, said during a news conference on Monday that
agents used various methods to investigate Mr. Mateen, including sending an
undercover informant who made contact with the suspect, wiretapping his
conversations and scrutinizing his personal and financial records.
They also sought help from Saudi intelligence officials to learn more about his
trips to the kingdom in 2011 and 2012 for the Umrah, a sacred pilgrimage to
Mecca made by Muslims. More than 11,000 Americans make pilgrimages to Mecca each
year, and Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. found no “derogatory” information about his
trips.
During interviews with F.B.I. agents, according to Mr. Comey, Mr. Mateen said he
had made the incendiary remarks “in anger” because his co-workers had ridiculed
his Muslim background and he wanted to scare them. The F.B.I. closed its
investigation and took him off the terrorist watch list.
But two months later, in July 2014, his name resurfaced in connection with the
young man from coastal Florida, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who had traveled to
Syria and carried out the suicide bombing at the hilltop restaurant. During the
course of that investigation, F.B.I. agents learned that the two men had
attended the same mosque and knew each other “casually,” Mr. Comey said.
The F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Mateen a third time, but determined that his ties to
the suicide bomber were not significant. The bureau had no further contact with
Mr. Mateen.
Mr. Comey defended the work of his agents, although the bureau’s handling of the
case is likely to be the subject of scrutiny and criticism in the coming weeks.
Graphic: What Happened Inside the Orlando Nightclub
Still, cases such as these rankle F.B.I. counterterrorism agents, who believe
they draw criticism for any choices they make — either for leaving cases open
too long, or for closing cases that don’t seem to have enough evidence.
Don Borelli, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisor in New York, said
there was a danger in criticizing agents who close investigations for lack of
evidence.
“Can we allow people’s futures to be affected if there is no proven basis for
it? That’s the flip side to all this,” he said.
Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, told reporters on Monday that the
Justice Department might look to adopt new procedures that would alert
counterterrorism investigators if someone who had been on a terror watch list
tried to buy a gun.
Mr. Mateen bought the two weapons used in the attack just this month, officials
said. “One would have liked to have known about it,” Ms. Yates said.
Federal investigators are now left to sift through disparate clues in search of
any clear motive for Sunday’s killings.
The Islamic State has tried to turn the bloody event into a propaganda coup, and
on Monday the group’s daily news bulletin boasted about the great victory
carried out by “our brother, Omar Mateen.”
Mr. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, was unequivocal on Monday that his son
had committed an “act of terrorism.” But the elder Mr. Mateen and other family
members said they were still puzzled why a young man who had never been
particularly religious is now being tied to the Islamic State’s murderous
ideology.
They said that at this point they can find no easy explanations.
“Why did he do this?” his father asked. “He was born in America. He went to
school in America. He went to college — why did he do that?”
“I am as puzzled as you are.”
Follow Mark Mazzetti @MarkMazzettiNYT, Eric Lichtblau
@EricLichtblau and Alan Blinder @alanblinder on Twitter.
Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau reported from Washington, and Alan Blinder from
Port St. Lucie, Fla. Reporting was contributed by Julie Turkewitz from Boulder,
Colo.; Mujib Mashal from Fort Pierce, Fla.; Richard A. Oppel Jr. from New York;
and Matt Apuzzo from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2016, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Twice Scrutinized by F.B.I., Orlando Killer
Exposes Gaps in Fighting ISIS-Inspired Acts.
Four people were killed in separate shootings across New York
City late Saturday and early Sunday, the police said.
The killings were a reminder of the pockets of violence that exist in the city,
even as it has become safer in recent years. Two of the shootings, in the Bronx
and in East New York, Brooklyn, happened in police precincts that are among the
city’s deadliest.
No arrests had been made in any of the killings as of Sunday evening.
The first shooting was reported shortly after 9:30 p.m. Saturday, near the
intersection of East 175th Street and Monroe Avenue in the Mount Hope section of
the Bronx, the police said. A man, identified by the police as Marvin Harris,
was shot three times in the abdomen, and in an arm and a leg.
Mr. Harris, 32, was taken to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, where he was
pronounced dead, the police said.
The police said that they had suspects, and that it was unclear what prompted
the shooting. Police officials said Mr. Harris, who lived about five miles away
in the Bronx, had an extensive arrest history.
Less than an hour later, the police were called to the John Adams Houses, a New
York City Housing Authority complex on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx, where a
29-year-old woman was found with a single gunshot wound to the torso.
The police said the woman, Jessica White, was with a group of about a dozen
people in a courtyard behind one of the buildings when a man wearing a black
sweatshirt and a ski mask approached them and opened fire. Ms. White was taken
to Lincoln Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Later on Sunday, the police
released a photograph from a surveillance camera of a “person of interest” in
the killing.
The shooting, which investigators believe was gang related, was the ninth
homicide recorded this year in the 40th Precinct, an area of the South Bronx
where violence has persisted.
Shortly after 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, the police were called to Rogers Place,
near East 163rd Street in the Bronx, where officers found a 31-year-old man who
had been pushed from his wheelchair and shot in the head during a dispute, the
authorities said. The man, Eric Oliver, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Mr. Oliver had about 30 packets of crack cocaine on him when he was found,
police officials said. The police said he had a criminal history. Mr. Oliver was
paralyzed in 2006 after he was shot in the lower back.
On Sunday, around 3 a.m., the police were called to Linwood Street, near Hegeman
Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where they found two men had
been shot.
Those two and another man had been sitting on a building’s front stoop when
gunshots were fired, and they ran inside. A 22-year-old was shot several times
in the lower body and a 32-year-old was shot once in the left hand. Both men
were taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where the
22-year-old, whose name has not been released, was pronounced dead. The third
man was not injured.
The police said that the motivation for the killing was unclear and that they
did not have any information about suspects. Investigators found a “large
quantity” of marijuana and money inside the home, a police spokesman said. At
least 10 other killings have been recorded this year in the 75th Precinct, which
covers East New York and is among the city’s most violent, according to police
statistics.
Follow The New York Times’s Metro coverage on Facebook and
Twitter, and sign up for the New York Today newsletter.
A version of this article appears in print on June 13, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
In 6 Hours, 4 Are Killed In Shootings Across City.
ORLANDO, Fla. — A gunman who pledged allegiance to the Islamic
State killed 50 people and wounded 53 in a crowded gay nightclub here early
Sunday. The gunman, identified as Omar Mateen, had been investigated twice by
the F.B.I. for possible connections to terrorism, the bureau said, but no ties
could be confirmed.
Mr. Mateen, 29, an American citizen whose parents were from Afghanistan, called
911 and talked about the Islamic State shortly before the massacre at the Pulse
nightclub, the worst mass shooting in American history, Ronald Hopper, an
assistant agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Tampa Division, said at a news
conference. Other federal officials said more explicitly that he had declared
allegiance to the group.
“The F.B.I. first became aware of him in 2013 when he made inflammatory comments
to co-workers alleging possible terrorist ties,” but could not find any
incriminating evidence, Agent Hopper said.
In 2014, the bureau investigated Mr. Mateen again, for possible ties to Moner
Mohammad Abusalha, an American who grew up in Florida but went to Syria to fight
for an extremist group and detonated a suicide bomb. Agent Hopper said the
bureau concluded that the contact between the two men had been minimal, and that
Mr. Mateen “did not constitute a substantive threat at that time.”
The suspicions did not prevent Mr. Mateen, who lived in Fort Pierce, Fla., from
working as a security guard, or from buying guns. The federal Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Mr. Mateen legally bought a long gun and a
pistol in the last week or two, though it was not clear whether those were the
weapons used in the assault.
Hours after the attack, the Islamic State claimed responsibility in a statement
released over an encrypted phone app used by the group. It stated that the
attack “was carried out by an Islamic State fighter,” according to a transcript
provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda.
But officials cautioned that even if Mr. Mateen, who court records show was born
in New York and had been married and divorced, had been inspired by the group,
there was no indication that it had trained or instructed him, or had any direct
connection with him. The pair who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in
December also proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State, but investigators do
not believe they had any contact with the group.
“The F.B.I. is appropriately investigating this as an act of terror,” President
Obama said from the White House. He said that the gunman clearly had been
”filled with hatred” and that investigators were seeking to determine any ties
to overseas terrorist groups.
“In the face of hate and violence, we will love one another,” he said. “We will
not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead, we will stand united as
Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action
against those who threaten us.”
As he had after previous mass shootings, the president said the shooting
demonstrated again the need for what he called “common sense” gun measures.
“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to
get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school or a house
of worship or a movie theater or a nightclub,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to
decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. To actively do nothing is a
decision as well.”
The killer stormed the Pulse nightclub armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle
and a handgun at about 2 a.m., while more than 300 people were inside dancing
and drinking, John Mina, the Orlando police chief, said. Mr. Mateen shot about
one-third of the people in the packed club, mowing down patrons while many
others, some of them bleeding, fled down the darkened streets of the surrounding
neighborhood.
The result was the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001,
and the deadliest attack in the nation’s history on a specifically gay
gathering. The F.B.I. set up a hotline for tips.
The gunman holed up inside with dozens of people effectively held hostage, some
of them hiding in a restroom frantically calling for help, until about 5 a.m.,
when a police SWAT team, using an armored vehicle and stun grenades, raided the
building and killed him. Officials said 11 law enforcement officers had
exchanged fire with the gunman.
In that assault, an officer was wounded, his life saved by a Kevlar helmet that
deflected a bullet, and at least 30 people were rescued, Chief Mina said. Some
survivors escaped under cover of what the police called two “discretionary
explosions.”
The shooting led to an increase in security at gay pride events and gay
landmarks in cities around the country, including Washington, New York and
Chicago. Law enforcement officials in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday confirmed
the arrest of a heavily armed man who said he was in the area for West
Hollywood’s gay pride parade. The authorities, however, said they did not know
of any connection between the arrest and the Orlando shooting.
Some terrorist attacks, like the San Bernardino killings in December, were
carried out in the name of Islam by people, some of them born and raised in the
West, who were “self-radicalized.”
The Islamic State in particular has encouraged “lone wolf” attacks in the West,
a point reinforced recently by a spokesman for the group, Abu Muhammad
al-Adnani, in his annual speech just before the holy month of Ramadan. In past
years, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda ramped up attacks during Ramadan.
“Make it, Allah permitting, a month of hurt on the infidels everywhere,” Mr.
Adnani said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Noting that some supporters have lamented that they cannot strike at military
targets, he took pains to explain why killing civilians in the land of the
infidel is not just permitted but encouraged.
Photo
A member of the Orange County sheriff’s department at the scene of a shooting in
Orlando, Fla., on Sunday. Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press
Rasha Mubarak, the Orlando regional coordinator of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, released a statement saying: “We condemn this
monstrous attack and offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved
ones of all those killed or injured. The Muslim community joins our fellow
Americans in repudiating anyone or any group that would claim to justify or
excuse such an appalling act of violence.”
The toll of the dead and injured far exceeded those of the 2007 shooting at
Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed, and the 2012 shooting at an
elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where 26 people were killed.
Pulse, which calls itself “Orlando’s Latin Hotspot,” was holding its weekly
“Upscale Latin Saturdays” party with three D.J.s and a midnight show. Witnesses
described a scene of chaos and confusion, and some said it was hard at first to
realize that the gunshots were not part of the loud, pulsing dance music.
“We were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam, and the
only thing I could think of was to duck, but I ran out instead,” said Joel
Figueroa, 19, of Orlando, who had been inside. “Everybody was screaming and
running toward the front door. I didn’t get to see the shooter.”
He said a friend of his had been shot three times and taken to a hospital.
Ray Rivera, a D.J. at the club, was playing reggae music in the patio area when
the shooting started, while Latin music played inside the building.
Florida
“I heard shots, so I lower the volume of the music to hear better because I
wasn’t sure of what I just heard,” Mr. Rivera said. “I thought it was
firecrackers, then I realized that someone is shooting at people in the club.
“I heard like 40 shots coming from the main area of the club,” he continued. “I
ran away through a side gate. I saw bodies on the floor, people on the floor
everywhere. It was a chaos, everybody trying to get out.”
Mr. Rivera, 42, who has worked at Pulse for years, said: “This is a nice club,
decent, people come from all over to dance and have a good time. Young people. A
lot of young people were there last night. This is crazy.”
The club posted a message on its Facebook page about 3 a.m.: “Everyone get out
of pulse and keep running.”
People streamed out of the club into a chaotic situation with little idea of
where to go. “Cops were saying, ‘Go, go, clear the area,’” Christopher Hansen
told an Orlando TV station. “You don’t know who’s what and who’s where.”
Witnesses and police officers carried bleeding people down the streets,
sometimes loading them into police vehicles for the drive to hospitals rather
than waiting for ambulances. The club is three blocks down South Orange Avenue
from Orlando Regional Medical Center, the region’s primary trauma center, and
two other hospitals also took in victims.
“Please keep everyone in your prayers as we work through this tragic event,” the
nightclub’s post said. “Thank you for your thoughts and love.”
The Gay Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Central Florida said
it was offering grief counseling to victims and survivors.
Officials at Orlando Regional Medical Center asked members of the families of
victims and missing people to gather at the north entrance, where they would be
escorted inside.
The slaughter at Pulse occurred a day after the singer Christina Grimmie, a star
of YouTube and the reality TV show “The Voice,” was shot down after a concert in
Orlando. The police said she had been killed by a St. Petersburg, Fla., man who
drove to Orlando with the specific intention to kill Ms. Grimmie. The man, Kevin
James Loibl, killed himself moments later.
Chief Mina said Mr. Loibl had traveled to Orlando with two
handguns, several loaded magazines and a hunting knife. Police officials were
examining his telephone and computer to try to determine a motive.
Lizette Alvarez reported from Orlando, and Richard Pérez-Peña
from New York. Reporting was contributed by Wendy Thompson and Les Neuhaus from
Orlando; Alan Blinder in Fort Pierce, Fla.; Rukmini Callimachi from Paris; Eric
Lichtblau and Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Steve Kenny, Richard A. Oppel
Jr., Rick Rojas and Daniel Victor from New York.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Sha’Quille Kornegay, 2 years old, was buried
in a pink coffin, her favorite doll by her side and a tiara strategically placed
to hide the self-inflicted gunshot wound to her forehead.
She had been napping in bed with her father, Courtenay Block, late last month
when she discovered the 9-millimeter handgun he often kept under his pillow in
his Kansas City, Mo., home. It was equipped with a laser sight that lit up like
the red lights on her cousins’ sneakers. Mr. Block told the police he woke to
see Sha’Quille by his bed, bleeding and crying, the gun at her feet. A bullet
had pierced her skull.
In a country with more than 30,000 annual gun deaths, the smallest fingers on
the trigger belong to children like Sha’Quille.
During a single week in April, four toddlers — Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and
Sha’Quille — shot and killed themselves, and a mother driving through Milwaukee
was killed after her 2-year-old apparently picked up a gun that had slid out
from under the driver’s seat. It was a brutal stretch, even by the standards of
researchers who track these shootings.
These are shooters who need help tying their shoelaces, too young sometimes to
even say the word “gun,” killed by their own curiosity.
They accidentally fire a parent’s pistol while playing cops and robbers, while
riding in a shopping cart, after finding it in the pocket of the coat their
father forgot to wear to work. The gun that killed Sha’Quille last Thursday was
pointing up, as if being inspected, when it fired.
They are the most maddening gun deaths in America. Last year, at least 30 people
were killed in accidental shootings in which the shooter was 5 or younger,
according to Everytown For Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group that tracks
these shootings, largely through news reports.
With shootings by preschoolers happening at a pace of about two per week, some
of the victims were the youngsters’ parents or siblings, but in many cases the
children ended up taking their own lives.
“You can’t call this a tragic accident,” said Jean Peters Baker, the prosecutor
of Jackson County, Mo., who is overseeing the criminal case in Sha’Quille’s
death. Her office charged Mr. Block, 24, with second-degree murder and child
endangerment. “These are really preventable, and we’re not willing to prevent
them.”
Gun control advocates say these deaths illustrate lethal gaps in gun safety
laws. Some states require locked storage of guns or trigger locks to be sold
with handguns. Others leave safety decisions largely to gun owners.
Twenty-seven states have laws that hold adults responsible for letting children
have unsupervised access to guns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun
Violence, though experts say such measures have, at best, a small effect on
reducing gun deaths. Massachusetts is the only state that requires gun owners to
store their guns in a locked place, though it has not stopped youngsters there
from accidentally killing themselves or other children.
Gun rights groups have long opposed these kinds of laws. They argue that trigger
locks can fail, that mandatory storage can put a gun out of reach in an
emergency, and that such measures infringe on Second Amendment rights.
“It’s clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said Larry
Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of America. “To
base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.”
In Kansas City, Sha’Quille’s family is trying to come to grips with her death
and the murder charge facing Mr. Block. In interviews, several relatives said
they did not believe he deserved to be convicted of felony murder, but some
questioned his judgment in leaving a loaded gun out while he slept as well as
his actions after he discovered that his daughter was grievously wounded.
According to court records, Mr. Block told the police that immediately after the
shooting, he went to the bathroom, wrapped the gun in a shirt and put it into a
vent in the floor. He then ran outside carrying his dying daughter and yelled
for a neighbor to call for help. He was also charged with evidence tampering.
Sha’Quille’s mother, Montorre Kornegay, said that she had recently separated
from Mr. Block after more than five years together, but that they remained
close. She said he loved the girl, whose first word was “Daddy.” When he called
Ms. Kornegay from jail, he told her he was sorry and talked about how much he
missed Sha’Quille.
The girl was just 2, but wanted to be older, telling people she was already 5.
She would run through the house, playing her own private game of peekaboo,
relatives said. In a cacophony of squeaky children at home, relatives could
always distinguish Sha’Quille’s low, raspier voice. One day, she’ll be a singer,
they told one another.
“What happened was wrong,” Ms. Kornegay said. She said that she did not think
Mr. Block deserved to face a murder charge, but that he had behaved
irresponsibly. “Why didn’t you stay up and watch her?”
Parents, police officers and neighbors from Georgia to California are asking
similar painful questions this week. Here are some of their stories.
‘Stay With Me’
In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young
children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database. During the week in
April when Sha’Quille and the other children died, there were at least five
other accidental shootings by children and teenagers. Alysee Defee, 13, was shot
in the armpit with a 20-gauge shotgun she had used for turkey hunting in Floyd
County, Ind. Zai Deshields, 4, pulled a handgun out of a backpack at her
grandmother’s home in Arlington, Tex., and shot her uncle in the leg.
A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the
statistics show.
Holston Cole was 3, a boy crackling with energy who would wake before dawn, his
pastor said. He loved singing “Jesus Loves Me” and bouncing inside the
inflatable castle in his family’s front yard in Dallas, Ga.
About 7 a.m. on April 26, he found a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol in his
father’s backpack, according to investigators. The gun fired, and Holston’s
panicked father, David, called 911. Even before a dispatcher could speak, Mr.
Cole wailed “No, no!” into the phone, according to a redacted recording.
Mr. Cole pleaded for his 3-year-old son to hold on until the ambulance could
arrive: “Stay with me, Holston,” he can be heard saying on a 911 tape, his voice
full of desperation. “Can you hear me? Daddy loves you. Holston. Holston,
please. Please.”
Holston was pronounced dead that morning.
The local authorities have been weighing what can be a difficult decision for
prosecutors and the police after these shootings: Whether to charge a stricken
parent or family member with a crime. While laws vary among states, experts said
decisions about prosecution hinge on the specific details and circumstances of
each shooting. What may be criminal neglect in one child’s death may be legally
seen as a tragic mistake in another.
Officials with the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office have suggested that they
expect Mr. Cole to face, at most, a charge of reckless conduct.
“Anything that we do, criminally speaking, is not going to hold a candle to the
pain that this family feels,” said Sgt. Ashley Henson, a spokesman for the
sheriff’s office. Sergeant Henson said investigators had sensed early on that
the shooting was accidental. “You want to be able to protect your family and
take care of your family, but on the same hand, you’ve got to be safe with your
weapons,” he said.
Some gun control groups have urged states and district attorneys to prosecute
such cases more aggressively, saying that, grief aside, people need to be held
responsible for what are easily preventable deaths.
Brent Moxey, the pastor who officiated at Holston’s funeral, said the boy’s
father was already haunted. “I think he runs the scenario over and over and over
in his mind.” Mr. Moxey said the family — which did not respond to a message
left at their home seeking comment — was still asking for privacy.
About 1,000 mourners attended Holston’s funeral on April 30, remembering a boy
who loved superheroes and would sometimes wrestle cardboard boxes. The day he
died, he spent time alongside his mother, Haley, as she read the Bible, playing
with the highlighter pen she used to note passages, Mr. Moxey said.
“This little boy loved to tinker and to play, and he loved to get into things,”
Mr. Moxey said, describing the very impulse that probably led to Holston’s
death. “He loved to figure out how stuff works.”
A Ringing Purse
In Indianapolis, Kanisha Shelton would stay protectively near her 2-year-old
son, Kiyan, watchful of the stray dogs known to roam through the neighborhood.
But on the night of April 20, Ms. Shelton stepped away from the boy, leaving him
in the kitchen while she was upstairs. She had placed her purse out of his reach
on the kitchen counter, but when her phone started ringing, the boy apparently
pushed a chair close to the counter, climbed onto it and reached for the purse,
according to an account from a cousin, John Pearson. There was also a
.380-caliber Bersa pistol in it.
Just after 9 p.m., Ms. Shelton heard a loud bang and rushed downstairs. There,
in the kitchen, she found Kiyan lying on the floor, bleeding from a gunshot
wound to the chest. He was rushed to a local children’s hospital, where he was
pronounced dead.
Ms. Shelton’s mother, who answered her daughter’s cellphone, said the family did
not want to speak about the death. No criminal charges have been filed.
The police in Indianapolis said such scenes were becoming more common. “The
mother was obviously very shaken up,” Capt. Richard Riddle said. Indeed, on
Sunday night, another child, 10 years old, died in what the police say appears
to have been another accidental shooting.
A 2013 investigation by The New York Times of children killed with firearms
found that accidental shootings like these were being vastly undercounted by
official tabulations, and were occurring about twice as often as records said.
Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency physician and a researcher at the
University of California, Davis, who studies the public health effects of gun
violence, said that nearly everyone — from toddlers to adults — can fail to
accurately distinguish toy guns from real guns, loaded guns from unloaded ones.
“That doesn’t stop them from playing with it,” he said.
Mr. Pearson said he sympathized with Ms. Shelton and thought of Kiyan’s death as
a tragic accident. “It was up on the counter, so I do think she thought she put
the gun away, out of the baby’s reach,” Mr. Pearson said. “She’s going to be in
a living hell.”
Essie Jones, who lives across the street, said Ms. Shelton had recently taught
Kiyan to ride a small bicycle with training wheels, guiding him on the bike in
the driveway. “They’d be up in the yard playing,” she said. “He was very happy.”
In a condolence book online, Dianna Mitchell-Wright, who identified herself as
“Auntie,” wrote of her anguish over losing the boy she had nicknamed “My Main
Man.”
“All I have are memories,” she said, “and your pictures in my cellphone.”
Anguished Goodbyes
The coffin that held Za’veon was no bigger than a piece of carry-on luggage, and
it was so light that two pallbearers easily carried it through the packed St.
Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Bermuda, La.
His full name was Za’veon Amari Williams, but to his family in Natchitoches, the
3-year-old was known as Baby Zee. On April 22, he found a pistol and shot
himself in the head, according to Detective John Greely of the Natchitoches
Police Department. When paramedics arrived, they found the mother cradling the
boy and crying that he was not breathing, according to KSLA News 12.
The police arrested a companion of the mother, Alverious Demars, 22, on charges
of negligent homicide and obstruction of justice. Detective Greely said that the
police believed that the pistol belonged to Mr. Demars, and that he hid it after
the toddler shot himself. The police have not found the weapon.
“As a responsible adult it’s his obligation to secure that — to make sure a
child does not get ahold of it,” Detective Greely said, explaining why Mr.
Demars had been arrested.
The family declined to speak, but in a Facebook post, the boy’s mother, Destiny
Williams, wrote that she had not been able to sleep and was a “useless sad
waste.” “I can’t take life,” she wrote. “Why is it so cruel and unrelenting and
unforgiving.”
The funerals for these children were filled with a similar anguish.
At the funeral for Baby Zee, the wails and screams grew so loud during a final
moment of goodbye that ushers closed the church doors to give the family
privacy. In Georgia, Holston’s father tearfully read a letter that reflected on
how the family used to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” At the Kansas City funeral for
Sha’Quille, family members crumpled as they looked into the coffin, shaking with
tears or kissing her.
The day after Sha’Quille was buried, her maternal grandmother, Pamala Kornegay,
reflected on the girl who was missing from the cluster of grandchildren who sat
coloring on her living room floor. Ms. Kornegay said she was not angry with
Sha’Quille’s father.
“We’re just upset,” she said. “It was careless. It could have been prevented.”
So senseless, she said, because Mr. Block had loved his daughter so dearly.
“He would take a bullet for her,” she said.
Jack Healy reported from Kansas City; Julie Bosman from Chicago;
Alan Blinder from Dallas, Ga.; and Julie Turkewitz from Denver. Mitch Smith
contributed reporting from Chicago; Ian Lovett from Wilseyville, Calif.; Jack
Begg from New York; and Nathan Magner from Bermuda, La.
A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2016, on page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Guns in Tiny Hands: In a Week, Four Toddlers
Shoot Themselves.
No one can know for sure what was in the mind of the person who
fired the shot that killed a woman as she drove through Milwaukee on Tuesday.
The shooter was 2 years old.
The woman who died on State Highway 175 was Patrice Price, 26, the Milwaukee
County sheriff’s office said Wednesday, and the gun was in the hands of her own
toddler.
The weapon, which investigators found on the floor of the back seat, was a
.40-caliber pistol used by Ms. Price’s boyfriend, a security guard. His gun belt
and tactical vest were also in the car, the sheriff’s office said. The local
news media reported that the blue Dodge sedan Ms. Price was driving belonged to
the boyfriend.
The sheriff’s office, which would not name the boyfriend, said in a statement
that the 2-year-old, who was not in a car seat, “retrieved a firearm that slid
out from under the driver’s seat and shot through the seat, striking the
driver.”
Ms. Price managed to stop the car, but by the time rescue personnel reached her,
she was not breathing. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The sheriff’s office did not say whether anyone would face criminal charges.
In tales of gun violence, accidents involving curious children and weapons seem
especially tragic, but they are not especially unusual. Most often, they involve
guns left unsecured by the child’s parents.
In the seven days that ended Tuesday, in addition to the death of Ms. Price, a
3-year-old in Georgia, a 3-year-old in Louisiana, a 2-year-old in Missouri and a
2-year-old in Indiana fatally shot themselves; a 4-year-old in Texas shot and
wounded a family member; a 16-year-old in California killed a 14-year-old friend
in a shooting that officials called accidental; a 15-year-old in Texas
accidentally shot and wounded a 16-year-old friend; and a 13-year-old in Indiana
accidentally shot and wounded herself.
In an episode with striking parallels to the Milwaukee shooting, last month a
mother driving in Florida was shot and wounded by her 4-year-old son, who was in
the back seat; law enforcement officials said that in that case, too, the gun
had been stashed under the driver’s seat, and then slid backward. The woman,
Jamie Gilt, had operated a pro-gun Facebook page on which she said her children
knew how to shoot, and “even my 4-year-old gets jacked up to target shoot the
.22.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group, says that since the start of
2015, at least 342 people in the United States have been accidentally shot by
people under age 18.
When Ms. Price, a mother of three, was fatally shot in Milwaukee, her mother and
her 1-year-old child were also in the car.
“Now I don’t have her no more,” her father, Andre Price, told WISN, a local
television station. “I got a knot in my chest.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 28, 2016,
on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Toddler, a Loose Gun in
a Car, and a Mother Is Shot to Death.
A 51-year-old man shot and killed five people in the
unincorporated East Georgia community of Appling on Friday night, officials
said, before fatally turning a gun on himself in his garage.
Capt. Andy Shedd of the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office said the suspect, Wayne
Hawes, lived in the neighborhood, about 25 miles west of Augusta, where he
carried out the shootings at two houses, killing three adults in one of them and
two in the other.
Relatives said one of the victims, Reba Dent, was Mr. Hawes’s mother-in-law, and
Vernon Collins, the Columbia County coroner, said Mr. Hawes’s wife was in
protective custody on Friday night.
The shootings occurred about 35 minutes apart, Capt. Shedd said.
The captain said the police were called to 3162 Johnson Drive about a shooting
at 7:54 p.m. He said two victims were declared dead at the scene; a third died
at a hospital. One man and two women were killed, he said.
Mr. Collins said the man who was shot was also found with his throat slit.
At 8:32 p.m., the police were called to a shooting at 5581 Washington Road,
about half a mile away from the scene of the first shooting.
At that second site, a woman and a man were found dead of gunshot wounds, he
said.
Mr. Collins and Harriett Garrison, the county’s deputy coroner, identified the
five victims. Ms. Dent, 87, was found at the scene of the first shooting, as
were Roosevelt Burns, 75, and Trequila Clark, 31. Ms. Clark was discovered alive
but wounded, and was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead.
Discovered at the second scene were the bodies of Shelley Williams, 63, and his
wife, Lizzie Williams, 60. Each died from a single gunshot wound to the neck.
They were sitting on a sofa when they were killed, Ms. Garrison said.
Sheriff’s deputies found Mr. Hawes’s body in his house about midnight. He died
of what appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the head and had apparently
tried, and failed, to set the house on fire, Capt. Shedd said.
A resident of the neighborhood, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because
the gunman was still being sought at the time of the interview, said she was
home with her mother when they heard four gunshots in the first shooting.
“My mother was like, ‘That’s a whole bunch of shooting,’ ” the resident said.
At first, she said, they thought it was someone hunting in the woods.
“We just kind of peeked out,” she said, adding that they saw a man leave from
the victims’ home in a car. “After we saw him go off, we were like, ‘That’s not
right.’ ”
Then, she said, another resident — a relative of the victims — who had gone to
the house to investigate started screaming, “Call 911! Call 911!” she said.
The resident said she entered the home with the relative and could see two
people in chairs were already dead and another person was slumped over and
bleeding profusely.
She said the road late on Friday was teeming with police officers, some of them
with assault rifles.
The location where three of the victims were shot is set amid a cluster of small
one- and two-bedroom clapboard homes in a historically African-American
neighborhood called King Villa.
The other home, where the second shooting occurred, is on a high embankment.
A woman named Tonya Dent was leaving the house on the embankment Friday night.
She appeared sad but calm and offered scant detail, though she did say, “A
husband and wife were killed here.”
She also said that all five victims were members of her extended family.
“All I know is my family’s gone,” she said.
On Friday night, a group of about 30 people stood in the yard, apparently
gathered in prayer, illuminated by a single streetlamp and the flickering blue
lights from sheriff’s cruisers.
Richard Fausset contributed reporting from Atlanta.
Two Minneapolis police officers will not face state criminal
charges in the fatal shooting of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man, the
prosecutor in Hennepin County said Wednesday. The announcement upset activists
who had called for the officers to be prosecuted, and provided new details about
the events leading up to the shooting.
Mr. Clark’s death prompted weeks of heated, sometimes tense demonstrations, and
raised broad questions about racial disparities in Minnesota. Protests started
almost immediately after Mr. Clark, 24, was shot on Nov. 15 as officers
responded to a report of an assault.
The police said at the time that Mr. Clark was a suspect in the assault and that
he had tried to interfere with paramedics treating the woman who was hurt. Some
neighbors who say they witnessed the incident claim Mr. Clark was handcuffed
when he was shot, contradicting the police account.
In announcing his decision, Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, said
that witnesses had given conflicting accounts about the handcuffs. The evidence,
he said, suggested that Mr. Clark had tried to gain control over one officer’s
gun and that he had not been handcuffed when shot.
“Forensic evidence and video evidence both support the belief that Clark was not
handcuffed at any time through the altercation,” said Mr. Freeman, whose office
posted a trove of investigative documents online.
He said the evidence did not support criminal charges. “These officers did not
have a chance to withdraw or to negotiate,” he said.
Activists said they believed the officers involved in the shooting, Mark
Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze, should face criminal charges, and were clearly
unsatisfied Wednesday with Mr. Freeman’s explanation.
The prosector briefly took questions after his announcement, including from
community members and activists. Some told him he had relied too heavily on the
police officers’ accounts and not enough on those of neighbors who witnessed the
shooting.
“If the city burns, it’s on your hands,” one woman told Mr. Freeman at the news
conference.
After the shooting in November, which was investigated by the Minnesota Bureau
of Criminal Apprehension, activists occupied an area outside a police precinct
for more than two weeks, sometimes clashing with officers. On one night, a group
of outsiders came to the precinct and shot five people during a protest.
Activists also demanded the release of video that showed parts of the encounter,
and Mr. Freeman played some of it at the news conference. One video showed Mr.
Clark just outside an ambulance that was carrying the woman who had been hurt.
Another showed an officer taking Mr. Clark to the ground.
Many protesters had requested that Mr. Freeman not convene a grand jury to
consider charges, citing fatal police shootings in Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo.,
where grand jurors decided not to indict officers. This month, Mr. Freeman said
he would stop presenting police shooting cases to grand jurors, as had been past
practice, in an effort for greater transparency.
“I concluded that the accountability and transparency limitations of a grand
jury are too high a hurdle to overcome,” Mr. Freeman said at the time. He said
he would decide whether to bring charges in the Clark case, “and I will do it as
fairly as I can.”
As Minneapolis waited for a decision on charges to be announced, city officials
prepared for the possibility of more protests. The police chief, Janee Harteau,
posted a YouTube video this month warning that the police “will not tolerate
acts of violence against anyone, and that includes acts of violence against our
officers.” The video included footage of a firebomb being hurled toward officers
and vandalism to the police station, and was denounced by some activists as
unfair and inflammatory.
In a statement after the video’s release, Mayor Betsy Hodges expressed “regret”
that some of the images “do not reflect that the large majority of the people
who protested at the Fourth Precinct last fall did so peacefully.”
“In Minneapolis, we value First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful
protest,” Ms. Hodges said in that statement, adding that she had spoken to Chief
Harteau about her concerns. “As mayor, I intend to honor those values.”
A separate federal civil rights investigation into Mr. Clark’s death is
continuing, a spokesman for the United States attorney in Minnesota said this
week. The spokesman, Ben Petok, declined to offer a timeline on when that
investigation might finish.
A gunman killed a mother and her son and injured another person
in a shooting outside a public-housing project on Staten Island on Thursday
evening, the police said.
The gunman opened fire around 6 p.m., striking the mother, 47, in the head and
her 21-year-old son in the face. Both were taken to Richmond University Medical
Center, where they were pronounced dead, the authorities said.
A 22-year-old man was shot in his left leg, the police said, and was taken to
Richmond University Medical Center, where he was in critical but stable
condition.
The shooting took place outside the Mariner’s Harbor Houses, a public-housing
project in the Mariners Harbor neighborhood, the authorities said. The project
is made up of 22 buildings, sprawling across more than 21 acres, that house
about 1,700 people, according to the New York City Housing Authority.
John Anthony, a Staten Island resident who was at the houses on Thursday and
said he visited friends there several times a week, described it as a quiet
neighborhood where violent crime and gunfire were rare.
Maria Villegas, 56, said she had lived in the complex for 20 years and knew both
of the victims, whose names were not released by the police on Thursday night
because their next of kin had not been notified.
She said the mother “was always talking about her kids” and described the son as
an amateur mechanic who just last week helped figure out why her steering wheel
was shaking.
“They were good people,” she said. “They did not deserve this.”
Ms. Villegas was in her kitchen when she heard gunfire, she said, and came
outside a short while later to find “a whole lot of cops.”
She said she felt “an emptiness inside” when she learned that the victims were
her friends. “You see somebody today, and tomorrow they are just gone,” she
said.
The police said that the gunman was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, and that
he fled the scene in a dark-colored Hyundai Accent.
Melinda Santana, 40, who has lived in the complex for eight years, said she knew
the man who was killed. She described him as a “jokester.”
About his death, she said: “I can’t even give you a word for it. It’s just like
wow.”
No one was in custody in connection with the shooting on Thursday night.
Bryan Anselm and Jason Grant contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2016,
on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:
Two Are Killed and One Is Injured in Staten Island Shooting.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A Mexican man who stands accused of murdering
five people and was captured Wednesday was in the country illegally and should
have been jailed or deported last year, federal immigration officials said, but
three times in less than a year, he was arrested and allowed to go free because
of procedural errors.
Pablo A. Serrano-Vitorino, 40, who was caught after a manhunt across two states,
had a felony conviction on his record, had been deported once before and had
returned to the United States illegally.
In November 2014, he was convicted of a misdemeanor drunken driving in Coffey
County, Kan., but Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which did not know he
was in the country, has no record that the local authorities notified the
agency, said Gillian Christensen, the press secretary for the agency. Some law
enforcement agencies do not routinely notify the agency of possible undocumented
immigrants unless they are charged with felonies.
Last June, Mr. Serrano-Vitorino was arrested here on a domestic battery charge,
and the police notified the immigration agency but did not send his
fingerprints, Ms. Christensen said. In that situation, she said, the agency
first verifies people’s identities in person before asking the police to hold
them for possible deportation. But Mr. Serrano-Vitorino was released before that
could happen.
And in September, the agency received more news of Mr. Serrano-Vitorino, when he
went to court in Overland Park, Kan., to pay a fine for driving without a
license. In that case, the agency did ask that he be detained, sending a request
to the local sheriff’s office. But immigration officials said the sheriff’s
office could not act on the request because it did not have him in custody. Once
again, he went free.
Jerome A. Gorman, the district attorney of Wyandotte County, which includes this
city, said Wednesday that he would like to talk with the agency about what
happened. “We can’t go on this way,” he said, “and something needs to be
corrected so the system works properly.”
Studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than
native-born people, and the Obama administration has increased deportations to
record levels. But Donald J. Trump has made the threat posed by immigrants a
theme of his presidential campaign, saying that many people coming from Mexico
are rapists, murderers and drug dealers. He has promised to deport all
undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the border with Mexico.
Some high-profile cases have fed the concerns over immigrants, particularly the
killing last July of a young woman on a pier in San Francisco by a man who had
been deported to Mexico multiple times.
In 2002, when Mr. Serrano-Vitorino was not in custody, a court ordered him
deported. The next year, he was convicted in California of making a terrorist
threat and sent to prison. He was sent back to Mexico in 2004 when he was
released.
When he returned to the United States is unclear, but he had been living for
some time in this area. Most recently, he lived in a small house on a cul-de-sac
in a working-class, mostly white neighborhood. Officials said he lived with a
woman and her three children, one of whom was also his.
Michael L. Capps, 41, had lived for several years in the house next door to Mr.
Serrano-Vitorino.
Late Monday, the police responded to a report of gunshots at Mr. Capps’s home.
They found four men dead or dying: Mr. Capps; Jeremy D. Waters, 36; Clint E.
Harter, 27; and Austin L. Harter, 29. All four had been shot with a rifle, and
no other weapons were involved, Mr. Gorman said.
The hunt for Mr. Serrano-Vitorino included several agencies from Kansas and
Missouri, and nearly 100 officers. On Tuesday morning, it shifted to rural
Montgomery County, Mo., 170 miles east of here, when Mr. Serrano’s truck was
spotted, abandoned on Interstate 70. Minutes later came a report of a shooting
nearby: Randy J. Nordman, 49, had been killed at home by an intruder.
Later that day, “a citizen had called in and notified us that while he was in
that area, a subject approached him with a gun,” said Sgt. Scott White of the
Missouri Highway Patrol.
At 12:18 a.m. on Wednesday, they found Mr. Serrano-Vitorino in a ditch, with a
rifle nearby, and he was arrested without incident, Sergeant White said.
He has been charged with the four killings in Kansas and the one in Missouri,
and is being held in Montgomery County. Mr. Gorman said it had not yet been
decided where he would be prosecuted first.
Traci Angel reported from Kansas City, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.
Julia Preston contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2016, on page A10 of the
New York edition with the headline: Errors Led to Releases of Murder Suspect in
U.S. Illegally.
WOODBRIDGE, Va. — A police officer was fatally shot a day after
being sworn in, and two of her colleagues were wounded while responding to a
reported argument at a northern Virginia home, authorities said.
A county official said a civilian woman was also killed in the domestic dispute
Saturday.
Officers received a call around 5:30 Saturday evening in Woodbridge, about 30
miles southwest of the nation's capital, about a "verbal argument," Sgt.
Jonathan Perok, spokesman of the Prince William County Police Department, said.
It's not clear how the altercation between the suspect and police began, but the
suspect, a military serviceman, is in custody and was not injured, he said. The
condition of the other two officers is not known.
The department announced on its Facebook page that Officer Ashley Guindon had
died from the injuries she sustained in the shooting.
A picture of Guindon was posted to the department's Twitter page on Friday with
a tweet that read, "Welcome Officers Steven Kendall & Ashley Guindon who were
sworn in today & begin their shifts this weekend. Be Safe!" It is not known if
the other officer in the tweet was involved in the shooting incident.
Guindon had been a county police officer a few years ago and had left and
returned to the force, Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William County
Board of Supervisors, said in a phone interview with The Associated Press on
Saturday night. He said he did not know the exact dates of when she started and
left.
Another woman was killed in the domestic call and was dead before police
arrived, Stewart said, but police declined to confirm that information. Stewart
also said there was a child in the house during the incident who was not harmed.
Prince William County Commonwealth Attorney Paul Ebert told The AP Saturday
night that he has authorized a capital murder charge, along with other counts,
against the suspect, who has not been identified.
At Inova Fairfax Hospital, where the three officers were flown by helicopter
after the shooting, more than 100 patrol cars lined the roads outside early
Sunday morning to stand vigil and escort Guindon's body to the medical examiner.
The shooting occurred in the Lake Ridge neighborhood, on a curving street with
$500,000 suburban houses with brick and siding exteriors, manicured lawns and
two-car garages about a five-minute drive from the county office building.
Until Saturday evening, the big news in the police department was the planned
retirement of Chief Steve Hudson, who announced two weeks ago that he will step
down at the end of March, and officers' plans to do a "polar bear" plunge on
Saturday morning to raise money for Special Olympics.
NEWTON, Kan. — Three people were killed at a manufacturing plant
in Hesston, Kan., on Thursday by a man who had driven through at least two towns
shooting a gun out of his car window, the police said.
The gunman was killed in a gunfight with a police officer inside the factory,
the authorities said.
T. Walton, the sheriff of Harvey County, told reporters that the shootings
occurred around 5 p.m. at the factory and on the roads between Hesston and
Newton, Kan., where the gunman lived. The factory is owned by Excel Industries,
a company that makes riding mowers and other lawn care equipment.
Sheriff Walton said that four people, including the gunman, had been killed at
the factory and that 14 others were injured, 10 of them critically. The gunman,
who worked at the plant, shot three more people as he drove to the factory,
including a man whose car he stole on the way there. He shot a woman in the
parking lot at the factory before entering the building and opening fire.
All of the victims were shot with an assault rifle, the sheriff said, but a
handgun was also found on the gunman after he was killed.
“The shooter was actively firing on any target that came across his sights,”
Sheriff Walton said, adding that he appeared to pick his targets at “random.”
Paul Mullet, the chief executive of Excel Industries, said that the gunman was
an employee of the company. He said the plant would be shut down during the
investigation.
The name of the gunman was not released, and no motive was given.
Sheriff Walton said there were at least two other crime scenes in Newton, where
the police were positioned outside the gunman’s mobile home late Thursday.
He said that the officers wanted to search the home, but that the gunman’s
roommate was inside and refused to let them enter.
But late Thursday, Lt. Bryan Hall, a spokesman for the Newton
Police Department, said that there had been no standoff and that no one was
inside the home. He said that SWAT officers were brought in to secure the house
as a precaution, and the police were waiting to obtain a search warrant.
Sheriff Walton said the F.B.I., the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were aiding the
investigation.
“It is a large, large crime scene, and there are many different crime scenes
involved,” he said.
The shooting erupted during the factory’s second shift, the sheriff said, when
more than 150 people would have been at work. Fifteen ambulances and two
helicopters transported the injured to Newton Medical Center, and two hospitals
in Wichita, Via Christi Saint Francis Hospital and Wesley Medical Center, he
said.
Speaking by telephone from his hospital bed, Jesus Fierros, 25, said he was
inside the plant when the shooting began. He ran, then felt a burst of pain in
his right leg.
“I just heard the gunshots and I just took off running,” he said. “I heard
people saying someone was shooting, and then I got shot in the leg and everyone
started helping me.”
He said he never saw the gunman. “At that moment I wasn’t thinking,” he added.
“I was just running, getting as far away as possible.”
Another employee, Marty Pierce, told KAKE-TV, a local ABC affiliate, that the
gunman “started spraying everyone” with bullets in the assembly area near the
paint department.
“I thought it was a fire or an explosion — I didn’t know someone was shooting,
but then our robot operator decided to go look down the hallway and he got
shot,” Mr. Pierce said.
He said he fled to the parking lot while shots continued to ring out in the
plant. Nicole Goodwin, the wife of a factory supervisor, spoke to reporters
while she waited outside the plant for her husband, who she said called her
after the shooting to say he was unharmed.
“I got a phone call saying they got put on lockdown because some random guy came
in with an AK-47 and started shooting,” she told the ABC affiliate.
“I’m just worried about everybody that I know here,” she said.
Chris Mueller, another relative interviewed outside the factory, said that he
was told that the gunman arrived during break time and opened fire.
“He shot a lady in the parking lot, then shot at people in the lobby,” Mr.
Mueller said.
Sheriff Walton said that the woman shot in the parking lot was in critical
condition.
In the Hesston area, north of Wichita, some said the shooter had hit the region
at its heart: The Excel plant is not just the gunman’s former workplace, but a
community hub, employing hundreds of people in a central Kansas town with a
population of fewer than 4,000.
At Excel, brothers work side by side, spouses pass one another on breaks, and
fathers and sons clock in and out together. “Lots of families work there,” said
Josh Chase, a former plant employee whose brother, cousin and other relatives
work at the factory.
“They are pretty shook up,” he said. “My cousin that works there, his wife’s
cousin works there as well, and was shot in the head. And my brother won’t talk
to anyone.”
John Eligon reported from Newton, Kan., Liam Stack from New York
and Julie Turkewitz from Denver.
A version of this article appears in print on February 26, 2016, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Three People Killed by Gunman at a
Manufacturing Plant in Kansas.
KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The shootings came out of nowhere, one after
the other, and with no apparent connection.
A woman was shot multiple times as she stood in the parking lot of her suburban
townhouse complex here in Kalamazoo County. A few miles away, and a few hours
later on Saturday night, a man and his teenage son were killed outside a
balloon-lined car dealership near a strip of fast-food restaurants. Minutes
after that, along an interstate highway just outside Kalamazoo, four women were
shot to death, and a teenage girl was gravely injured, as they sat in their cars
outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant.
The authorities said a single gunman, Jason B. Dalton, a driver for Uber, was
responsible for the night of terror, and investigators were looking into reports
that he was ferrying his passengers before the attacks began and perhaps even in
between some of the shootings.
One customer said Mr. Dalton took him on a harrowing ride around 4:30 p.m. on
Saturday, less than two hours before the shootings. Another said Mr. Dalton
agreed to provide her a ride late Saturday, after the attacks were over.
Photo
Flowers placed at the foot of a tree near a Cracker Barrel restaurant in
Kalamazoo, Mich., one of three sites of a series of shootings that left six
people dead and two injured late Saturday. Credit Brittany Greeson for The New
York Times
The explosion of violence here left the authorities trying to piece together
what might have prompted someone to roam in search of victims.
In all, six people were killed and two injured at three shooting scenes across
Kalamazoo County, in southwest Michigan between Detroit and Chicago. The victims
ranged in age from 14 to 74.
Mr. Dalton, 45, a former insurance company employee, was arrested without
incident in the parking lot of a downtown Kalamazoo bar about six hours after
the rampage began.
“There’s this sense of loss, there’s this anger, there’s fear, there’s all these
emotions,” Jeffrey Getting, the Kalamazoo County prosecutor, said at a news
conference early on Sunday. “You put on top of that: How do you go and tell the
families of these victims that they weren’t targeted for any reason than they
were there to be a target?”
Over the past year, the country has experienced a series of mass shootings —
including ones at a church in Charleston, S.C.; at a community college in
Oregon; and at a county government gathering in San Bernardino, Calif., which
was later declared an act of terrorism. President Obama has repeatedly called
for the nation to take steps to curb gun violence and carry out stricter
background checks.
The authorities here did not immediately provide a motive for the rampage.
“There is some information out there about what was happening” in the suspect’s
life, Mr. Getting said. “You know, of course, it doesn’t come anywhere near to
explain what he’s done.”
Mr. Dalton, who was in custody on Sunday and was expected to face formal charges
as early as Monday, had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as quiet and
polite, though he caught their attention when he occasionally shot a gun out the
back door of the house he shared with his wife and two children. He had worked
for Progressive Insurance until mid-2011.
According to one passenger, he started working as an Uber driver recently. The
passenger, Sara Reynolds, 25, said Mr. Dalton drove her and a friend to a movie
theater on Feb. 14 so they could see “Deadpool.”
In an interview, Ms. Reynolds recounted how Mr. Dalton had told her that he and
his son had also seen the movie. But he also told Ms. Reynolds, unsolicited,
that he was a new driver for Uber and that he had quickly picked up poor marks.
“He had just started doing Uber as a driver a day or two ago and that he had
already gotten some bad reviews, which was a little weird, so I asked him about
it,” Ms. Reynolds said. “And he said it was just drunk kids and his car messing
up a little bit.”
“I could tell that he didn’t really want to talk about it anymore,” said Ms.
Reynolds, who described Mr. Dalton as “a little shy and awkward, but he was
pretty normal for the most part.” Ms. Reynolds said she had no complaints about
his driving that night.
An Uber official who declined to be identified because of the continuing
investigation said Mr. Dalton had passed a company background check.
Joe Sullivan, the chief security officer for Uber, said the company was
“reaching out to police to help with their investigation in any way that we
can.”
“Our hearts and prayers are with the families of the victims of this devastating
crime and those recovering from injuries,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Another Uber passenger, Matt Mellen, said in an interview with WWMT-TV that a
driver who appeared to be Mr. Dalton picked him up late Saturday afternoon, and
that the man had driven erratically, speeding through the streets, ignoring a
stop sign and swerving through traffic.
“He wouldn’t stop,” Mr. Mellen said. “He just kind of kept looking at me like,
‘Don’t you want to get to your friend’s house?’ and I’m like, ‘I want to get
there alive.’ ” Mr. Mellen said he had left the vehicle as quickly as he could.
He later told his fiancée what had happened, and she posted a warning on
Facebook around 5:30 p.m. Saturday and said they had called 911. He said he also
contacted Uber about the ride.
Shortly before 6 p.m., in a quiet suburban community northeast of Kalamazoo,
shots rang out. James George, 17, said he had looked out the window to see a
vehicle speeding away and a woman, wounded, sitting in the parking lot of the
development. At least five bullet holes peppered the side of one rental
townhouse. The woman, whom the authorities did not publicly identify, remained
hospitalized on Sunday evening.
About four hours later, at a Seelye Ford and Kia car dealership in Kalamazoo,
there were more shots. Tyler Smith and his father, Richard Smith, 53, were
killed, the authorities said.
Then, in a matter of minutes, five others were shot as they sat in two cars —
parked beside each other — at a Cracker Barrel in an isolated area near an exit
ramp from an interstate highway. Bullet holes were left in a windshield and the
car windows.
Four women died of multiple gunshot wounds, the medical examiner’s office said.
They were identified as Mary Jo Nye, 60; Dorothy Brown, 74; Barbara Hawthorne,
68; and Mary Lou Nye, 62. A 14-year-old girl, part of the group, was in critical
condition at a hospital.
In a nearby mobile home park, Chris Juenemann said she had been watching
television when she heard five bangs, which she immediately recognized as
gunshots. “It was just so loud,” she said.
Ms. Juenemann, whose family has lived there for 17 years, said that the
restaurant was always busy, and that serious crime was rare. She said dozens of
emergency vehicles soon arrived.
More than two hours later, Mr. Dalton was arrested. Officers from the Department
of Public Safety and deputies from the Kalamazoo Sheriff’s Department spotted
the suspect’s car in downtown Kalamazoo Sunday morning and pulled him over and
arrested him, the authorities said. No shots were fired.
A semiautomatic handgun was found in his vehicle, and the authorities said it
appeared to match the evidence from the shootings. Investigators said Mr. Dalton
had been in touch with more than one person over the course of the evening, and
they were examining his cellphone for more evidence.
“We are very confident that we have the right person in custody,” said Mr.
Getting, the prosecutor.
In the rural area outside the city where Mr. Dalton lived, police searched his
brown, one-story home on Sunday morning. Sally Pardo, a retired nurse who lived
across the street from him and his family, said she and her husband had always
thought of Mr. Dalton as a “nice guy” who worked on cars in his spare time. But
he used guns in a troubling manner and sometimes sounded a little paranoid, she
said.
“He periodically shot his gun out the back door,” Ms. Pardo said. “He would
shoot randomly into the air.”
James Block, 53, who said he had lived next door to Mr. Dalton for about 15
years, said he was “well-mannered” and pleasant. Mr. Block noted that Mr. Dalton
bought a guard dog about a year ago after an apparent burglary, and said he had
spoken of concerns about people passing through his backyard.
Less than an hour after the shootings ended, Mr. Dalton agreed to pick up a
couple at a local pub, according to Carmen Morren, who said she and her
boyfriend had agreed to the ride around 11 p.m.
Minutes before the pickup, though, the couple — unaware of the shootings —
happened to change their plans and rode with a different Uber driver.
“By the grace of God, we ended up canceling the Uber that we had,” said Ms.
Morren, who provided a screenshot that showed Mr. Dalton had been the driver for
a trip that had been scrapped. “We lucked out on that one.”
Mitch Smith reported from Kalamazoo, Monica Davey from Chicago,
and Alan Blinder from Atlanta. Reporting was contributed by Julie Bosman from
Chicago, and Mike Isaac, Liam Stack and Eli Rosenberg from New York. Susan
Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2016, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Random Shots on a Deadly Night for
Kalamazoo.
WASHINGTON — The centerpiece of a plan for stemming gun violence
that President Obama announced last month largely amounts to this: an updated
web page and 10,000 pamphlets that federal agents will give out at gun shows.
In a tearful display of anger and sadness in the East Room of the White House,
Mr. Obama ordered steps intended to limit gun violence and vowed to clamp down
on what he called widespread evasion of a federal law requiring gun dealers to
obtain licenses.
But few concrete actions have been put in motion by law enforcement agencies to
aggressively carry out the gun dealer initiative, despite the lofty expectations
that Mr. Obama and top aides set.
Obama administration officials said they had no specific plans to increase
investigations, arrests or prosecutions of gun sellers who do not comply with
the law. No task forces have been assembled. No agents or prosecutors have been
specifically reassigned to such cases. And no funding has been reallocated to
accelerate gun sale investigations in Washington or at the offices of the 93
United States attorneys.
The absence of aggressive enforcement is a reminder of the limits of Mr. Obama’s
executive authority, even as he repeatedly asserts the power of the Oval Office
to get things done in the face of inaction by a Republican Congress.
Even the National Rifle Association, which fights anything it perceives as a
threat to gun rights, has not sued to block Mr. Obama’s actions, and gun groups
profess little reason for concern. “Nothing, from what we can see, has changed,”
said Mike Bazinet, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an
industry group.
Administration officials say that with Congress unwilling to take any
legislative action, the White House’s plan goes as far as Mr. Obama can to keep
guns out of the hands of criminals and people with mental illnesses.
“The actions the president announced last month represent the maximum the
administration can do under the current law,” said Eric Schultz, the deputy
White House press secretary, “namely increasing mental health treatment and
reporting, improving public safety, managing the future of gun safety technology
and, of course, enhancing the background check system.”
Mr. Obama has been under pressure from gun control advocates to confront gun
violence since he failed to convince Congress to approve universal background
checks in 2013. The highly stage-managed announcement in January gave him the
chance to demonstrate what he called the “fierce urgency” to respond to mass
shootings.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told reporters on the day Mr. Obama announced
the plan that the government was “ramping up our enforcement efforts,
particularly online” and “will be looking” for unlicensed gun dealers.
But turning promises into action is often difficult — a political reality that
Mr. Obama and his aides know all too well — especially in the face of a sluggish
bureaucracy and a determined, partisan opposition in Congress. The president’s
attempts to sidestep lawmakers on immigration have been tied in courts for more
than a year, and he faces fights on executive orders to expand gay rights,
establish a minimum wage for federal contractors and combat climate change.
The most visible sign of the president’s initiative to license more gun dealers
is the printing of 10,000 pamphlets clarifying what qualifies a gun seller as a
dealer. Officials plan to hand out the pamphlets at gun shows, weekend flea
markets and elsewhere. They say they hope the “education campaign,” as it is
called, will prompt more gun sellers to register as dealers, who then must
conduct background checks. The same information has been updated on the website
of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The new guidance says that there is no “bright line” for determining whether
someone should register as a dealer, but that a number of factors — such as
selling even a small number of new firearms in their original packaging, making
a profit and selling regularly at gun shows or online — could qualify.
Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general, said the A.T.F.’s new
guidance would put people who sold guns regularly “on notice” that they must
register as dealers and conduct background checks. She said it should also lead
to more successful prosecutions of unregistered gun dealers who are flouting the
law.
But gun control advocates say they want more than just notification. Jonas
Oransky, counsel at Everytown for Gun Safety, said the A.T.F. should not expect
that arrests and prosecutions would happen “without extra energy behind it by
them,” but added, “We’re giving them some time to figure out how best to do
this.”
Some experts are skeptical that the president’s actions will have much effect,
even if they are carried out fully.
“This is a very modest plan,” said Joe Vince, a former administrator at the
A.T.F. who now teaches criminal justice. “I don’t think the president had much
more authority than to do what he did.”
White House officials said it was too early to judge the effect of the
president’s measures. And they said the effort to register more gun dealers was
just one piece of his initiative. Other elements would tighten rules on gun
purchases by corporations and more quickly identify lost or stolen guns.
The president also sought to improve the F.B.I.’s ability to identify prohibited
gun buyers by hiring more background check examiners and by collecting more
criminal and mental health information from states.
But a number of the elements that Mr. Obama took credit for last month were
already underway before he directed the administration to develop new gun
measures in the wake of mass shootings in California and Oregon in the fall.
The F.B.I., for example, has already received funding for an additional 230
examiners in the next two years to handle the growing requests for background
checks.
The president is wary of creating any appearance that he is sending in armies of
federal agents to take away people’s guns.
“Our No. 1 goal here is not to slap the cuffs on people for not being
registered,” Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general, said. “We believe there are
a lot of folks out there who want to comply with the law.”
Mr. Obama’s lawyers have cautioned against seeming to create new gun laws by
fiat. The most the president can do, they have said, is to direct better
enforcement of the laws that exist.
The bulk of the new responsibilities outlined by Mr. Obama will fall to the
A.T.F., an agency that has suffered from chronic underfunding and understaffing,
years of scandals, and distrust from Republicans and gun rights groups. Mr.
Obama plans to request tens of millions of dollars from Congress for additional
A.T.F. agents, but Republicans are hesitant to approve it.
The A.T.F. has been without a confirmed director since April; the White House
has blamed a backlog of confirmations in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Michael Bouchard, a former assistant director at the A.T.F., faulted Mr. Obama
for not nominating anyone to the job as part of his plan.
“How could you say that all this stuff about guns is so important, but you don’t
think it’s important enough to name a nominee to run the agency?” Mr. Bouchard
asked. “This would have been a great time for it.”
A.T.F. officials said that the agency had not named anyone to oversee the plan
or set up new committees to run it. Brian Garner, a special agent and spokesman
for the agency, said: “We’ve not at any point said we’re going to do any big
rollout. Right now, we’re going to work the cases with the resources we have and
do the best job we can.”
Supporters of the plan said they had been assured that it would be enforced
aggressively.
“It was significant; it was bold,” said Maura Healey, the Massachusetts state
attorney general. “It takes time for the directive to be implemented.”
Correction: February 8, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated the title for Jonas Oransky, a gun
control advocate. He is a counsel, he is not the chief counsel.
IN my early
years as a police reporter, I often pulled up to a crime scene minutes before
the homicide detectives arrived. Too many times to count I’d find a young black
man my age or younger dead with a halo of blood or brain matter splashed on the
pavement. Often there were shell casings sprinkled around freshly fallen bodies.
Some were killed over turf, some out of revenge. Many were victims of the deadly
grind of the drug trade. Others were killed by the police. A high number were
innocent people caught in crossfire, many of them children.
I learned to identify family members by the level of grief they’d show.
Inconsolable wailing, unsteady feet, breathless delirium — a mother or sister.
Angry, with balled fists and tears — a brother or close cousin. Girlfriends
often ran in after the police had arrived, and the crime scene was set, clawing
at the police tape. The best friends and homeboys stayed close but not too
close, trading whispers before leaving the scene on clouds of three or four
people at a time, vengeance bubbling up in their minds. The fathers always
seemed stoic, either numbed by the pain or resigned to the way young black male
life was so easily lost. They, too, had been young black men once.
In many of their faces I’d seen the faces of my own family, people I loved and
who loved me. I saw my own mother’s tears and could imagine my older brother and
his boys with guns tucked into their waistbands, ready to squeeze off shots had
I been the one with a bloody halo.
Over more than a dozen years I’ve evolved from a run-and-gun street reporter in
Philadelphia and New Orleans to a national reporter flying across the country to
cover social justice issues, high-profile incidents of shootings by police
officers and the growing Black Lives Matter movement. But no matter the cause of
the bloodshed I continue to chronicle, the tool of the garden-variety thug and
beat cop alike remains essentially the same. The gun.
The toll of gun violence in our most beleaguered, depleted communities is great.
And we’ve recently arrived at yet another moment when the issue of guns has been
thrust into the national political dialogue. President Obama just weeks ago
rolled out executive actions aimed at, among other things, closing the so-called
gun show loophole and the flow of illegal weapons to people who shouldn’t have
them. What followed was much what you’d expect from the partisan debate over
guns. Conservatives rebuffed calls to make it the slightest bit more difficult
to buy firearms. Many liberals said the president’s actions didn’t go far
enough.
As politicians tangle over how best to manage the country’s obscenely huge and
growing arsenal of privately owned guns, the rat-a-tat of gun violence continues
to bleed us all.
For those of us keeping tabs on the impact of guns in black and brown
communities, there is no solace. This exhausting dance between black death and
black scribe is as much a performance in journalism as it is a perpetual act of
catharsis.
My family has experienced its own measure of gun death. In the mid-1970s, a
couple of years before I was born, a disgruntled prospective tenant murdered my
grandfather over a $160 security deposit. Decades later a young woman put a
bullet in the back of my stepbrother’s head. Years later, two cousins, brothers,
would be touched by the plague: One was shot down and the other is serving a
long prison sentence for a separate incident, a botched robbery turned murder.
An act of gun violence is central to the story of how I came to be, too. In 1924
my maternal grandmother’s family joined the Great Migration north from Georgia
after a white gunman killed her older brother. He was just 12 years old. The
family eventually landed in New Jersey, but violence followed. In 1951 another
of my grandmother’s brothers, this one younger, was shot and killed by a New
Jersey State Trooper. He was just 17. Years later, when my grandfather was
killed he left behind eight children, including my mother.
Many times when I sat with victims’ families and slowly drew out their stories
and their tears, I have to believe, they saw me as one of their own. They often
shooed away white reporters, but shared with me intimate memories of their loved
ones. They dug up old yearbook photos and rattled off their dead boy’s — they
were almost always boys — hopes and dreams. They didn’t shy away from their
shortcomings, criminal or otherwise.
Years ago, in Philadelphia, I met a 19-year-old named Kevin Johnson who weeks
earlier had been paralyzed by a bullet to his spine. A group of teenagers had
pressed a gun to the back of his neck and demanded the basketball jersey off his
back. He refused and one of them pulled the trigger. The day I met him he’d just
started talking again and his family had smuggled me into his hospital room.
Medical tubes and wires snaked from his body, tangling his lanky, limp brown
frame.
“God wouldn’t give me anything I couldn’t handle,” Kevin told me. “I’m going to
try and live a regular life.”
His mother and I traded a look over his hospital bed, knowing his life would be
anything but regular. A few years later, under the weight of catastrophic injury
and medical complications, Kevin’s body finally gave in.
I like to tell myself that I’ve served as a conduit for the last whispers of
lives lost too soon. That I am capturing, in a crucial way, the sad mundanity of
American gun violence. But sometimes, it seems I’m little more than a peddler of
pain. A cog in a much broader story that seems to give short shrift to black
death and too little scrutiny to a gun industry that profits while so many
perish.
My days glued to a police scanner are long behind me. The fever of chasing
gunfire and sirens has broken. I’ve mostly traded covering individual tragedies
for covering a movement that wants those individual tragedies to actually lead
to some form of positive change. It feels as much like a natural progression as
it does a sort of masochistic calling.
There are more than 300 million guns in America. Almost as many guns as there
are Americans. And each year about 11,000 people are killed by guns wielded by
others. An additional 20,000 or so use guns to take their own lives. While gun
violence has fallen since the bad old days of the late 1980s and early ’90s, far
too many people — in poor black communities in particular — remain trapped and
traumatized by violence.
Last month, I was in Chicago, where through the first two weeks of the year,
according to the Chicago police, homicides are up 113 percent and shootings are
up nearly 200 percent from the same period last year.
I met a woman whose 20-year-old daughter was killed a couple of years ago,
trapped in the crossfire of a gang shootout. She held her daughter’s funeral on
what would have been the girl’s 21st birthday. There have been no arrests in her
daughter’s case. Investigators haven’t given her any updates and they’ve all but
stopped answering her incessant phone calls, she said.
“She just lost her life for nothing,” the woman told me, cradling a heavy gold
urn filled with her daughter’s ashes. “I take her with me everywhere I go,
because before she was killed we spent every minute together. I’m going to keep
carrying her with me until her death makes sense.”
As that mother waits for closure, the bodies of the 90 or so people who are
killed each day by guns in this country will continue to pile up. Whether we’re
carrying them in an urn or not, the burden of their weight belongs to all of us.
Trymaine Lee
is a national reporter at MSNBC, a fellow at the New American Foundation and is
at work on “Million Dollar Bullets,” a book about gun violence in America.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 31, 2016, on page SR2 of the
New York edition with the headline: Black Lives and Bloodshed.
FOR those of us who argue in favor of gun safety laws, there are
a few inconvenient facts.
We liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it’s
complicated: The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent
since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States
has dropped by half.
Then there are the policies that liberals fought for, starting with the assault
weapons ban. A 113-page study found no clear indication that it reduced shooting
deaths for the 10 years it was in effect. That’s because the ban was poorly
drafted, and because even before the ban, assault weapons accounted for only 2
percent of guns used in crimes.
Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws: With some 13 million Americans now
licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be
erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all
these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime (as conservatives had
predicted) nor a spike in killings (as liberals had expected). Liberals were
closer to the truth, for the increase in carrying loaded guns does appear to
have led to more aggravated assaults with guns, but the fears were overblown.
One of the puzzles of American politics is that most voters want gun regulation,
but Congress resists. One poll found that 74 percent even of N.R.A. members
favor universal background checks to acquire a gun. Likewise, the latest New
York Times poll found that 62 percent of Americans approved of President Obama’s
executive actions on guns this month.
So why does nothing get done? One reason is that liberals often inadvertently
antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association by coming
across as supercilious, condescending and spectacularly uninformed about the
guns they propose to regulate. A classic of gun ignorance: New York passed a law
three years ago banning gun magazines holding more than seven bullets — without
realizing that for most guns there is no such thing as a magazine for seven
bullets or less.
And every time liberals speak blithely about banning guns, they boost the N.R.A.
Let’s also banish the term “gun control”: the better expression is “gun safety.”
Yet this, too, must be said: Americans are absolutely right to be outraged at
the toll of guns. Just since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than all
the Americans who died in wars going back to the American Revolution (about 1.45
million vs. 1.4 million). That gun toll includes suicides, murders and
accidents, and these days it amounts to 92 bodies a day.
We spend billions of dollars tackling terrorism, which killed 229 Americans
worldwide from 2005 through 2014, according to the State Department. In the same
10 years, including suicides, some 310,000 Americans died from guns.
So of course we should try to reduce this carnage. But we need a new strategy, a
public health approach that treats guns as we do cars — taking evidence-based
steps to make them safer. That seems to be what President Obama is trying to do.
Research suggests that the most important practical step would be
to keep guns away from high-risk individuals, such as criminals, those who abuse
alcohol, or those who beat up their domestic partners.
That means universal background checks before somebody acquires a gun. New
Harvard research confirms a long-ago finding that 40 percent of firearms in the
United States are acquired without a background check. That’s crazy. Why empower
criminals to arm themselves?
Some evidence supports steps that seem common sense. More than 10 percent of
murders in the United States, for example, are by intimate partners. The
riskiest moment is often after a violent breakup when a woman has won a
restraining order against her ex. Prohibiting the subjects of those restraining
orders from possessing a gun reduces these murders by 10 percent, one study
found.
“If you can keep a gun from someone at that moment of threat, that is very
important,” notes Daniel W. Webster, a gun safety expert at Johns Hopkins
University who has pioneered research on keeping guns from high-risk
individuals.
Some public health approaches to reducing gun violence have nothing to do with
guns. Researchers find that a nonprofit called Cure Violence, which works with
gangs, curbs gun deaths. An initiative called Fast Track supports high-risk
children and reduces delinquency and adult crime.
In short, let’s get smarter. Let’s make America’s gun battles less ideological
and more driven by evidence of what works. If the left can drop the sanctimony,
and the right can drop the obstructionism, if instead of wrestling with each
other we can grapple with the evidence, we can save thousands of lives a year.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 17, 2016, on page SR11 of
the New York edition with the headline: Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for
Liberals.
While the gun violence debate often focuses on mass shootings of
strangers, hundreds of Americans are fatally shot every year by spouses or
partners. In 2013, 61 percent of women killed with guns were killed by husbands,
ex-husbands or boyfriends. And in 57 percent of shootings in which four or more
people were killed, one of the victims was the shooter’s partner or family
member, according to an analysis by the group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Yet shortcomings in federal and state law allow many domestic abusers to have
access to firearms, even after courts have determined that the abusers pose a
threat to their partners.
Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of any felony, or of misdemeanor domestic
violence against a spouse, from owning a gun. People subject to a domestic
violence restraining order issued after a hearing (not a temporary order issued
before a hearing can take place) are also prohibited from owning guns. But
people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors against partners with whom
they never lived are not prohibited from owning guns under federal law, nor are
those convicted of misdemeanor stalking. Senator Amy Klobuchar and
Representatives Debbie Dingell and Robert Dold have introduced bills to close
these loopholes, but the bills have gained little traction.
While a background check should prevent anyone prohibited from purchasing a
firearm from doing so, federal law does not require private sellers to perform
background checks. The results can be deadly: In 2012, a Wisconsin man subject
to a domestic violence restraining order purchased a gun from a seller on the
website ArmsList.com and used it to kill his wife, two other women and himself.
In her request for the restraining order, his wife had written, “His threats
terrorize my every waking moment.”
An effort to expand background-check requirements to include all online and gun
show sales failed in the Senate last month. Currently, 18 states and the
District of Columbia require background checks on all handgun sales. Between
2008 and 2012, states that required background checks on private sales had 46
percent fewer gun homicides of women by partners, adjusted for population, than
states with no such requirement.
But checks on new gun sales are only part of the solution; states and the
federal government should also require that abusers surrender guns they already
have. Currently, 15 states require people under domestic violence restraining
orders to turn in their guns, and 10 states require those convicted of domestic
violence misdemeanors to do so. But even in states with gun surrender laws on
the books, enforcement is uneven.
Some states, like California and Connecticut, allow police to confiscate guns
from someone who is determined by a court to be a threat to a partner, even if a
domestic violence restraining order is not in place.
State and federal lawmakers need to follow the example of states that have
closed loopholes and enacted surrender laws to prevent the dangerous from
possessing deadly weapons.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 17, 2016, on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline: Keep Guns Away From Abusers.
On Tuesday, in an emotionally charged speech, President Obama
announced a series of relatively modest executive orders to aid in preventing
guns from getting into the wrong hands.
The proposal would expand background checks through a clarification of existing
regulations, increase funding for mental health care, and promote the
development of smart guns.
The speech itself accomplished more than the executive actions are likely to
accomplish. Viewed in political terms, the president injected this issue more
firmly into the national debate as only a president can. Because a sitting
president, even an exiting one, is always in the next presidential race: Other
candidates are either running, at least in part, against his legacy or to extend
it.
But there is one point that I was aching to hear articulated that wasn’t covered
in the president’s speech, and is rarely mentioned in discussions about gun
regulations: How our response to gun regulations is not now, nor has ever been,
wholly ideological but is also ethnocentric and class-based.
I firmly believe that part of the current intransigence is because those gun
homicides disproportionately affect poor minorities. (Gun suicides
disproportionately affect white people.) Indeed, the only time that national
figures seem to get fully engaged is in the wake of mass shootings that involve
white people, either as shooters or victims.
Indeed, you have to explore the history of gun regulations to fully appreciate
its racial dimensions.
In 2011, Adam Winkler spoke about his book “Gun Fight,” and the origins of gun
control, saying, according to The Wall Street Journal:
“It was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of
African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt.”
He continued:
“The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were
never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first
time — either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their
guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there’s
hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So
they arm up because they know who they’re dealing with in the South. White
racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that’s not really going to
work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in
large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were
disarmed, they couldn’t fight back.”
It was about white terror.
After Prohibition and the Depression gave rise to gangsters and outlaws who
posed a threat to white America’s sense of safety, the Firearms Act of 1934 was
passed. As the gun law expert Robert Spitzer, of the State University of New
York at Cortland, told NPR in 2013, the law required machine gun owners to pay a
hefty tax, be fingerprinted and be listed on a national registry; as a result,
sales of machine guns plummeted.
America was again stirred to action on gun control when, in 1967, armed members
of the Black Panthers entered a largely white place of power — the California
State Legislature. As The Times’s film critic A. O. Scott noted in his review of
Stanley Nelson’s fascinating documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the
Revolution”:
“When a group of Panthers demonstrated at the Statehouse in Sacramento carrying
loaded rifles and shotguns, the organization drew national news attention and
(at least temporarily) rallied many political conservatives, including Gov.
Ronald Reagan, to the cause of gun control.”
Reagan said of the Panthers’ action at the time:
“I don’t think that loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that should be
solved between people of good will. And anyone who would approve of this kind of
demonstration must be out of their mind.”
(This episode stands in stark contrast to the armed white men now occupying the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.)
In response to the Panthers, the California legislature passed and Reagan signed
the Mulford Act, which banned the open carry of firearms in the state. The
N.R.A. supported the measure. The bill’s author, Don Mulford, said at the time,
“We’ve got to protect society from nuts with guns.”
Edward Wyckoff Williams even claimed in The Root in 2013 that “the NRA actually
helped craft similar legislation in states across the country.”
The year after the Mulford Act, the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed.
Once again, white terror.
In recent decades, as the N.R.A.’s political power has grown, it has also taken
on more of an absolutist position against any new regulations and politicians
largely have bowed to the group’s stance.
Two notable exceptions were the 1993 Brady Bill requiring background checks for
gun purchase and the assault weapons ban of 1994 — which has since expired —
both of which were signed by Bill Clinton.
But in addition to the N.R.A.’s influence, the face of homicides is becoming
increasingly black and poor — two groups we have traditionally marginalized and
ignored.
As Richard V. Reeves and Sarah Holmes of the Brookings Institution pointed out
last month, 77 percent of white gun deaths are suicides while 82 percent of
black gun deaths are homicides.
But even then, it’s not the whole of the black population at risk of these
homicides.
As William J. Wilson, also of Brookings, wrote last month:
“Segregation by income amplifies segregation by race, leaving low-income blacks
clustered in neighborhoods that feature disadvantages along several dimensions,
including exposure to violent crime. As a result, the divide within the black
community has widened sharply. In 1978, poor blacks aged twelve and over were
only marginally more likely than affluent blacks to be violent crime victims —
around forty-five and thirty-eight per 1000 individuals respectively. However,
by 2008, poor blacks were far more likely to be violent crime victims — about
seventy-five per 1000 — while affluent blacks were far less likely to be victims
of violent crime — about twenty-three per 1000, according to Hochschild and
Weaver.”
There is now precious little political will to further inhibit the largely white
gun-buying population — according to the Pew Research Center, whites are twice
as likely as blacks or Hispanics to have a gun in the home — in order to help
reduce the scourge of homicides among poor black people, particularly when the
shooters are often black themselves. These killings are simply attributed to
racial culture rather than to the complicated interplay between poverty, crime
and gun culture.
And, since the federal government wouldn’t do enough to deal with this problem,
local municipalities have employed other methods to get guns — many of them
illegal — out of the hands of criminals. But those efforts, such as New York
City’s morally indefensible racial dragnet program called stop-and-frisk, did as
much damage as good in the black communities.
Lawmakers refused to act, and local politicians and police departments
overreacted. Poor black people were caught in the middle.
That, alas, is less about a response to white terror, than a nonresponse to
black pain.
President Obama shed tears on Tuesday as he called for new gun
safety measures, and some critics perceived weakness or wimpishness. Really? On
the contrary, we should all be in tears that 225,000 Americans have already died
of gun violence in his seven years in office.
The shame is not a president weeping a bit, but that he has not been able to
prevent roughly as many people dying of guns in America on his watch as have
been killed in the Syrian civil war (where estimates range from fewer than
200,000 to more than 300,000). Yes, the American gun toll includes suicides and,
yes, Syria is a smaller country, but it’s worth a cry that a “peaceful” America
during Obama’s tenure has lost roughly as many lives to gunfire as Syria has in
civil war.
Ted Cruz responded to the president’s executive actions with a web page showing
a scowling Obama in a helmet, looking like a jackbooted thug staging a home
invasion, with the warning, “Obama wants your guns.” Chris Christie protested
that Obama was behaving like a “petulant child.” Jeb Bush decried Obama’s
“gun-grabbing agenda.” Donald Trump warned that Obama was moving toward banning
guns. The upshot of all this scaremongering will be more Americans rushing out
to buy firearms.
Look, let’s acknowledge that liberals have not handled gun issues well over the
years. Liberals often antagonize gun owners by coming across as patronizing or
insulting — as well as spectacularly unknowledgeable about the guns they seek to
regulate. But on the basic question of whether more guns create more safety or
more risk, the evidence seems clear: Most gun owners use firearms responsibly,
but with more guns there are more tragedies.
Exclude guns and the U.S. has a rate for many violent crimes similar to that of
other rich countries. But because we have 300 million guns sloshing around, some
in the hands of high-risk individuals, we have a gun homicide rate that is about
20 times that of Australia (which cracked down on guns after a mass shooting
there).
Gun advocates say criminals will always have guns, so regulations make no
difference. But increasingly we have evidence that this is wrong.
The states with the most restrictive gun laws have the lowest gun death rates
(including suicides). Take Massachusetts and New York, which have some of the
tightest gun restrictions in America; they have three or four gun deaths per
100,000 inhabitants per year. At the other extreme, two of the states with the
most permissive gun regulations are Alaska and Louisiana, and both have gun
death rates about five times as high: more than 19 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Republican presidential candidates should look at the natural experiment that
occurred when Missouri eased restrictions on buying handguns. The result was a
25 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate, according to a study in the
Journal of Urban Health.
In contrast, Connecticut tightened regulations on buying handguns, and gun
homicides there fell by 40 percent, according to the American Journal of Public
Health.
This is not to say that regulations always work, or that fixing the problem is
simple. Daniel W. Webster of Johns Hopkins University cites research that
keeping guns from people with past convictions for domestic violence doesn’t
make much of a difference. But blocking access to guns by people subject to
current domestic violence restraining orders does reduce killings of intimate
partners.
We need an evidence-driven public health approach, modeled on our highly
successful regulation of cars to reduce auto deaths. That’s the approach the
Obama executive actions pursue. Republicans have said for years that we should
focus on enforcing existing laws. That’s what Obama is doing.
Likewise, Obama is pushing to investigate the feasibility of smart guns that
operate with a fingerprint or a PIN. This may or may not work, but it’s worth a
try in a nation where perhaps 300,000 guns are stolen annually. A toddler in
America shoots someone on average once a week because guns are so easy to pick
up and fire. If our cellphones can be made to work only with a PIN, it’s crazy
that anyone can use a stolen assault rifle.
There’s no magic wand to solve gun violence in America, but neither is it
immutable fate that 32,000 Americans die from firearms each year. We know from
the experience of states like Connecticut and Missouri that sensible regulations
save lives. And why wouldn’t we want to keep guns from men subject to domestic
violence restraining orders if the result is fewer women murdered by jilted
boyfriends?
The Republican presidential candidates are on the wrong side of history here.
While even Republican voters overwhelmingly say in polls that they favor
sensible steps like universal background checks, the Republican candidates are
politicizing what should be a public health issue, and they are scaring
Americans into buying more guns, which magnifies the problem and causes more
carnage.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 7, 2016, on
page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Guns, Tears and Republicans.
THE epidemic of gun violence in our country is a crisis. Gun
deaths and injuries constitute one of the greatest threats to public health and
to the safety of the American people. Every year, more than 30,000 Americans
have their lives cut short by guns. Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts.
Accidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost brothers and sisters, or
buried their own children. We’re the only advanced nation on earth that sees
this kind of mass violence with this frequency.
A national crisis like this demands a national response. Reducing gun violence
will be hard. It’s clear that common-sense gun reform won’t happen during this
Congress. It won’t happen during my presidency. Still, there are steps we can
take now to save lives. And all of us — at every level of government, in the
private sector and as citizens — have to do our part.
On Tuesday, I announced new steps I am taking within my legal authority to
protect the American people and keep guns out of the hands of criminals and
dangerous people. They include making sure that anybody engaged in the business
of selling firearms conducts background checks, expanding access to mental
health treatment and improving gun safety technology. These actions won’t
prevent every act of violence, or save every life — but if even one life is
spared, they will be well worth the effort.
Even as I continue to take every action possible as president, I will also take
every action I can as a citizen. I will not campaign for, vote for or support
any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun
reform. And if the 90 percent of Americans who do support common-sense gun
reforms join me, we will elect the leadership we deserve.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
President Obama answered an audience member’s question during a live event with
CNN’s Anderson Cooper at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
All of us have a role to play — including gun owners. We need the vast majority
of responsible gun owners who grieve with us after every mass shooting, who
support common-sense gun safety and who feel that their views are not being
properly represented, to stand with us and demand that leaders heed the voices
of the people they are supposed to represent.
The gun industry also needs to do its part. And that starts with manufacturers.
As Americans, we hold consumer goods to high standards to keep our families and
communities safe. Cars have to meet safety and emissions requirements. Food has
to be clean and safe. We will not end the cycle of gun violence until we demand
that the gun industry take simple actions to make its products safer as well. If
a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should also make sure she can’t pull
the trigger of a gun.
Yet today, the gun industry is almost entirely unaccountable. Thanks to the gun
lobby’s decades of efforts, Congress has blocked our consumer products safety
experts from being able to require that firearms have even the most basic safety
measures. They’ve made it harder for the government’s public health experts to
conduct research on gun violence. They’ve guaranteed that manufacturers enjoy
virtual immunity from lawsuits, which means that they can sell lethal products
and rarely face consequences. As parents, we wouldn’t put up with this if we
were talking about faulty car seats. Why should we tolerate it for products —
guns — that kill so many children each year?
At a time when manufacturers are enjoying soaring profits, they should invest in
research to make guns smarter and safer, like developing microstamping for
ammunition, which can help trace bullets found at crime scenes to specific guns.
And like all industries, gun manufacturers owe it to their customers to be
better corporate citizens by selling weapons only to responsible actors.
Ultimately, this is about all of us. We are not asked to perform the heroism of
15-year-old Zaevion Dobson from Tennessee, who was killed before Christmas while
shielding his friends from gunfire. We are not asked to display the grace of the
countless victims’ families who have dedicated themselves to ending this
senseless violence. But we must find the courage and the will to mobilize,
organize and do what a strong, sensible country does in response to a crisis
like this one.
All of us need to demand leaders brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby’s
lies. All of us need to stand up and protect our fellow citizens. All of us need
to demand that governors, mayors and our representatives in Congress do their
part.
Change will be hard. It won’t happen overnight. But securing a woman’s right to
vote didn’t happen overnight. The liberation of African-Americans didn’t happen
overnight. Advancing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
Americans has taken decades’ worth of work.
Those moments represent American democracy, and the American people, at our
best. Meeting this crisis of gun violence will require the same relentless
focus, over many years, at every level. If we can meet this moment with that
same audacity, we will achieve the change we seek. And we will leave a stronger,
safer country to our children.
It is a familiar claim by many Second Amendment defenders — and,
during the Obama administration, an increasingly popular one — that unfettered
gun rights are necessary to protect American citizens against the threat of a
tyrannical government.
In addition to being a misreading of history, the claim is amusing hyperbole to
those who have suffered under real-life tyrants. But this week’s armed standoff
at a federal wildlife sanctuary in eastern Oregon is showing how far a small,
determined band of antigovernment zealots with lots of big guns will go to make
their potentially deadly point.
Styling themselves as a militia, the group hijacked a peaceful protest over
five-year prison sentences a federal court had imposed on two local ranchers for
setting fires on federal land. Led by a man named Ammon Bundy — whose father,
Cliven, instigated his own armed confrontation with federal authorities over
cattle ranching in Nevada in 2014 — this hyperweaponized posse rolled into town
and seized administrative buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on
Saturday. Mr. Bundy said they are willing to stay for “as long as necessary,”
and that “if force is used against us, we would defend ourselves.”
The occupation is the latest outgrowth of a long-running movement by some
ranchers and farmers who believe the federal government controls far too much
land in Oregon, Nevada and other Western states. Mr. Bundy and his gun-toting
comrades argue that a century of federal policies has driven many ranchers into
poverty and destroyed the rural economy.
This is mostly nonsense. As part of its congressional mandate to balance
commercial and environmental concerns, including conservation, the federal
government imposes reasonable rules on how public land can be used for mining,
logging and ranching. On the whole Washington has been a benevolent, even
generous landlord.
There may be a good argument that the two ranchers in this case, Dwight Hammond
and his son, Steven, were punished unreasonably harshly for their crimes. But
the way to have this argument is through peaceful means, such as the original
protesters were doing, or as the Hammonds themselves chose to do — by reporting
to prison and asking President Obama for clemency. Every day, citizens around
the country sue or otherwise challenge the government over alleged violations of
the law or the Constitution, and they do it without a rifle in their hand.
A democracy cannot function any other way. It thrives on principled
disagreement, but it withers in the face of a loaded gun.
Such dangerous behavior also puts law enforcement in an impossible position:
respond with force and people may well die; walk away — as Bureau of Land
Management officials did with Cliven Bundy — and the extremists are only
emboldened. (On Monday, according to The Guardian, federal authorities said they
planned to shut off power to the buildings.)
Mr. Bundy and his band of militants have made few friends. Local law enforcement
has told them to leave immediately. Many residents, even those who agree that
the federal government owns and mismanages too much land, have strongly rejected
Mr. Bundy’s gun-happy tactics. The Hammonds’ own lawyer disassociated his
clients from the group. And while years of overheated antigovernment statements
from right-wing politicians and media figures have helped to fuel exactly this
sort of outburst, it is encouraging that many on the right have called for the
militants to stand down. When Ted Cruz says you’ve gone too far, it’s worth
listening.
The simple message Mr. Bundy and his band must hear is this: If everyone with a
gripe against the government responded by threatening federal officials with
weapons, America would no longer be a nation governed by the rule of law. Their
grievances, like everyone else’s, can be addressed. But not before they put down
the guns.
A version of this editorial appears in print on January 7, 2016, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: Guns, Anger and Nonsense in Oregon.
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday formally announced
executive action on guns in an East Room ceremony.
Q. Will the president’s plan close the loophole that has allowed millions of
guns to be purchased without criminal background checks at gun shows and online
bazaars?
A. No. Federal law already requires that anyone “engaged in the business” of
selling guns must be licensed and must conduct background checks on every
purchase. The problem is that many sellers at gun shows and on firearms websites
claim to be hobbyists who are exempt from those requirements. People who
purchase guns from those sellers are not subject to criminal background checks.
Mr. Obama’s executive action does not expand the existing law. Instead, his
administration has now “clarified” that people who claim to be hobbyists may
actually be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms if they operate an
online gun store, pass out business cards or frequently sell guns in their
original packaging. The president’s action also reiterates that there are
criminal penalties for violating the law.
Q. So, is the president ordering better enforcement of the existing laws to
crack down on people who are selling without the proper licenses and background
checks?
A. Yes, to the extent he can. He is asking Congress for funding to hire 200 new
agents and investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, though that request may be denied by Republican lawmakers. Mr. Obama
says the F.B.I. will increase the number of workers who process the background
checks by 50 percent, or 230 people. He says that should reduce delays in a
system that receives 63,000 background check requests each day. He also
announced the eventual development of a more modern computer system that can
process background checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The president is also seeking to close a loophole that has allowed people to
avoid background checks when they buy and sell certain weapons — machine guns
and sawed-off shotguns — by forming corporate entities and trusts to conduct the
sales. A new regulation will clarify that those purchases require background
checks.
Q. Are there other provisions of the president’s plan that would help keep guns
out of the hands of criminals or mentally ill people?
A. Yes. The Social Security Administration will begin looking at how to link
mental health records in its system with the criminal background check data. The
Department of Health and Human Services is clarifying that health privacy rules
do not bar states from reporting mental health records to the background check
system. And Mr. Obama is requesting $500 million from Congress to improve basic
mental health care.
In addition, Mr. Obama announced that the A.T.F. will spend $4 million to
enhance a ballistics database that analysts use to link guns to violent crimes.
He ordered the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the Department of
Homeland Security to sponsor research into gun safety technology. And at Mr.
Obama’s direction, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch wrote a letter to state
officials to encourage reporting of criminal information to the background check
system.
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A version of this article appears in print on January 6, 2016, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: What Executive Action Does, and Does Not
Do, for Background Checks.
WASHINGTON — As tears streamed down his face, President Obama on
Tuesday condemned the gun violence that has reached across the United States and
vowed to curb the bloodshed with or without Congress.
“In this room right here, there are a lot of stories. There’s a lot of
heartache,” Mr. Obama said in the White House East Room, flanked by relatives of
those struck down in mass shootings, including former Representative Gabrielle
Giffords of Arizona. “There’s a lot of resilience, there’s a lot of strength,
but there’s also a lot of pain.”
For all the emotion he showed, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces legal, political and
logistical hurdles that are likely to blunt the effect of the plan he laid out.
A number of the executive actions he plans are only suggested “guidance” for
federal agencies, not binding regulations. They were framed mostly as clarifying
and enforcing existing law, not expanding it. And many of those measures rely on
hefty funding increases that a Republican-led Congress is almost certain to
reject.
Among other measures, the plan aims to better define who should be licensed as a
gun dealer and thus be required to conduct background checks on customers to
weed out prohibited buyers.
Even the administration said it was impossible to gauge how big an effect the
steps might have, how many new gun sales might be regulated or how many illegal
guns might be taken off the streets.
“I don’t think anyone can credibly tell you yet what all this means,” Charles E.
James Jr., a former federal gun crimes prosecutor who now represents gun
industry clients, said of Mr. Obama’s plan.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told reporters Monday that she could not say
whether the new restrictions would have had any effect in a series of recent
mass shootings, including last month’s attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that
left 14 dead. But in the massacre of nine people at a South Carolina church in
June, the man charged, Dylan Roof, was able to buy a .45-caliber handgun despite
admitting to drug use. The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said at the time
that a breakdown in the background check system had allowed Mr. Roof to buy the
gun.
“Each time this comes up,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, “we are fed the excuse
that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last
massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying.
I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act
of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of
violence.”
Nearly 21 million gun sales were processed through the background check system
in 2014, but some industry analysts say as many as 40 percent more firearms
could have been sold through private transactions not subject to background
checks. Even the most hopeful advocates say the new plan would affect only
thousands of sales.
Proposals that would have the biggest effect have long been shelved by even the
most ardent gun control advocates who now see an assault weapons ban or
mandatory gun buyback programs like ones in Australia in 1996 and 2003 as
political fantasy.
Modest as the new measures may prove to be, the response was unrestrained.
Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders greeted them with
peals of protests and angry claims of a “gun grab” that would violate Second
Amendment rights. Gun control advocates hailed them as a breakthrough in what
has often been a losing battle to toughen firearms restrictions.
The families of gun victims and gun control activists crowded into the White
House and watched Mr. Obama break down as he recalled the young children gunned
down by an assailant in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“First graders,” the president said, his eyes drifting off and becoming red with
tears. He wiped his face and paused to regain his composure: “Every time I think
about those kids, it gets me mad.”
By taking action, Mr. Obama is purposely stoking a furious political debate that
has roiled Congress and spilled over into the presidential campaign. Vowing last
year to “politicize” the gun issue after a mass shooting at an Oregon community
college, Mr. Obama on Tuesday made good on that promise.
The National Rifle Association, targeted by Mr. Obama in his speech, mocked his
tears.
“The American people do not need more emotional, condescending lectures that are
completely devoid of facts,” said Chris W. Cox, the group’s top lobbyist.
Republican presidential candidates also raced to condemn Mr. Obama, with Senator
Ted Cruz of Texas putting up a web page with a menacing, altered picture of the
president in a commando outfit. A caption read “Obama Wants Your Guns” next to a
fund-raising appeal.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin posted his opposition on Twitter as the
president spoke, saying Mr. Obama’s “words and actions amount to a form of
intimidation that undermines liberty.”
But Mr. Obama’s allies were equally intense in their defense.
Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, posted
on Twitter from the East Room: “President wiping tears. So am I. One of the most
moving things I’ve ever seen.”
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, posted a “thank you” to
Mr. Obama for “taking a crucial step forward on gun violence.”
Mr. Obama’s plan is likely to face legal challenges from gun rights groups that
accuse him of overstepping his executive authority. A number of critics said
they suspected that the president’s push to “clarify” the definition of licensed
gun dealers could force even the occasional gun seller to register their
transactions.
Shortly before Mr. Obama’s remarks, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives released guidance to gun sellers on the criteria that could qualify
someone as a gun “dealer” who needs to be licensed and conduct background
checks. Those criteria include having a website, using business cards or selling
new guns in their original packages.
The 14-page pamphlet, posted on the agency’s website, offers examples to help
guide sellers, such as “Bob,” who wants to sell a gun collection that he
inherited (he would not need to be licensed) and “Sharon,” who sells guns at
flea markets every weekend (she would need to be licensed).
But the administration rejected more aggressive options, such as establishing a
defined threshold for the number of gun sales that would qualify someone as a
dealer required to conduct background checks.
White House officials were mindful of the legal reversals sustained when the
president tried to grant legal immigration status by executive action to five
million immigrants in the country illegally, and they said they tried to make
the gun plan as safe from legal attacks as possible.
“This is really pretty modest stuff,” said Ladd Everitt, the communications
director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an advocacy group.
Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in
Washington, who attended Mr. Obama’s speech, said many police organizations had
been pushing for more background checks on firearm purchases. While he praised
Mr. Obama for taking action, he said more needed to be done.
“If Congress doesn’t allow for legislation, I think he went as far as he could
using the bully pulpit,” Mr. Wexler said.
With Congress unwilling to act, many gun control groups have turned to states
for changes, with 18 states now imposing some form of background check.
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A version of this article appears in print on January 6, 2016,
on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline:
Tearful Obama Outlines Steps to Curb Gun
Deaths.
