Jesse Jackson: Police Shootings About Class As Well As Race
Hoping that Hammond's family sees the relevance of the underscored item.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/08/12/police-shootings-about-class-well-race
A week earlier, a young, unarmed man was shot to death by a police officer in Seneca, South Carolina. Only this young man was not black, but white.
According to CNN, Zachary Hammond was fatally shot while in a Hardee’s parking lot. He was 19 years old and on a date. The police officer was conducting a drug investigation and claims that he shot Hammond in self-defense when the unarmed teenager drove his car at him. A small amount of marijuana was found in the front passenger compartment. Police said the target of the investigation was not Hammond but his date. An independent autopsy showed, however, that Hammond was shot in the back, not the front, contradicting the official story. “He was a 19-year-old, 121-pound kid killed basically for a joint,” the family attorney Eric Bland said.
CNN reported that if this had been an African-American victim, it would have received national attention. That is true now, but only because an active movement of demonstrators have made it so. In fact, virtually the only protests to Hammond’s death were issued by #BlackLivesMatter activists on social media.
One year after Michael Brown’s fatal shooting in Ferguson, unarmed black men are still seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire, according to a new study by the Washington Post. So far this year, the Post reports, 24 unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police — one every nine days. The Post reports that 585 people in total have been shot and killed by police through August 7. (The Guardian database reports that 700 have been killed by police.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
