Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate
So why aren’t you hearing about it?
—By
AJ Vicens
| Wed Jul. 15, 2015 6:57 PM EDT
Nearly 100 people demonstrated in downtown Denver earlier this week after police there
shot and killed 35-year-old Paul Castaway on July 12. Police said the man was coming towards an officer with a knife, but his family and witnesses on the scene
dispute those claims and say he was pointing the knife toward himself.
The shooting comes a little more than a month after two
Denver Police officers were cleared in the shooting death of Jessie Hernandez, a 17-year-old girl killed in January when the officers fired into a stolen car she was supposedly driving toward them in an alley.
According to his mother, Castaway struggled with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Witnesses say he was holding a knife to his own throat and didn't threaten officers,
according to the Denver Post. Castaway was shot four times and died later that night. Denver Police Department spokesman, Sonny Jackson, told the Post that the department is reviewing the incident, and that the officers involved will be named soon.
Castaway was a Lakota Sioux. His death brings up a rarely-discussed aspect of the ongoing conversation around police brutality in the United States: Native Americans are more likely than most other racial groups to be killed by police.
Indian Country Today noted that
according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit organization that studies incarceration and criminal justice issues, police kill Native Americans at a higher rate than any other ethnic group.
The center's analysis relied on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics. It found that Native Americans, making up just .8 percent of the population, are the victims in 1.9 percent of police killings. When the numbers are broken down further, they reveal that Native Americans make up *three of the top five top age-groups killed by law enforcement:
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
"This is a reflection of an endemic problem in the perception of non-white people when it comes to the administration of justice," Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People's Law Project in South Dakota, told
Mother Jones. The group put out
a report called "Native Lives Matter" in February discussing various ways the justice system disproportionately impacts Native Americans. He said the US Department of Justice needs to address police violence against Native Americans and that Castaway's death is only the most recent example of the problem.
"You can tell they're shooting out of fear," he said. "If it's not out of hate, for some reason they're pulling the trigger before determining what the situation actually is. Something does need to happen. Somebody does need to take a look and we need help."
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The Police Are Killing One Group at a Staggering Rate, and Nobody Is Talking About It
The end of 2014 was a
bloody time for Native Americans.
Even as protesters rallied against the police killings of unarmed black people like Michael Brown and Eric Garner in December, Rapid City police
fired five bullets into Allen Locke, a 30-year-old Lakota man living in South Dakota.
In a tragic bit of irony, it was later revealed that Locke had been at a demonstration against police killings of indigenous people just one day earlier. Yet while devastating for his family and community, Locke's death illustrates a much bigger problem:
From 1999 to 2013, Native Americans were killed by law enforcement at nearly identical rates as black Americans, tying them for the most at-risk populations in this respect.
The difference is that almost no one is talking about them.
There are
5.1 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the U.S. as of 2011, significantly fewer than the country's
45 million black Americans (as of 2013). But like black Americans, indigenous people are killed by law enforcement officers at rates that far outstrip their share of the population.
While #BlackLivesMatter evolved into a national rallying cry for racial justice over the summer, a largely overlooked
#NativeLivesMatter movement has been quietly galvanizing activists as well. Few mainstream outlets report on it, but the indigenous blogosphere and Twitterverse abound with horror stories, not the least of which is that six Native men and women were killed by police in November and December alone.
"We protest, we take to social media, we get as many stories and Native American voices as we can into news media," Simon Moya-Smith, a journalist and editor with
Indian Country Today Media Network, told
Mic in an email. "[But still] we're not entirely on [the mainstream media's] radar – maybe for Indian mascots, but for police brutality? Barely, if at all."
In some of these cases, including Allen Locke's, the victims were allegedly armed when killed. But this designation doesn't always tell the whole story. In cases like that of
John T. Williams in 2010, for example, the knife the victim held that prompted Seattle police to take his life was a carving instrument, folded shut at the time of his shooting.
Williams' death set off a string of protests in early 2011. Although the officer who shot the 50-year-old resigned eventually, he was never charged with a criminal offense. It's a sad but familiar story for anyone who watched grand juries fail to indict Officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo for killing Brown and Garner, respectively.
Source:
Ted S. Warren/AP
Some of the factors that affect these altercations result from a long history of American legal meddling into Natives' affairs, including disproportionate rates of poverty, substance abuse, suicide and lowered access to education, employment and health care prospects. And officials' inability to properly address these disparities has resulted in the continued criminalization of indigenous people, exacerbated by the combined forces of systemic substance abuse, mental health issues and unemployment.
Take the following incidents as examples:
Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, 18, was shot seven times in Custer County, Oklahoma, in 2013. And 34-year-old
Benjamin Whiteshield was shot through the mouth and killed in Clinton, Oklahoma, in 2012. Both were experiencing episodes of mental illness when police killed them.
Meanwhile, Christina Tahhahwah was arrested during a bipolar episode on Nov. 13 and died after she went into cardiac arrest in a Lawton, Oklahoma, police holding cell. The details surrounding Tahhahwah's death are dubious, to say the least.
Native News Online reports she'd been handcuffed to her cell door "for unknown reasons," and that the 37-year-old's parents weren't notified of her transfer to the hospital — where she was pronounced dead — until many hours after the fact. Meanwhile, her fellow inmates claim she'd been "tased repeatedly" for refusing to stop singing Comanche hymns (Lawton Police have since denied the allegations).
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I'm not saying that racism does not exist in America it does and in a big way, Both ways.. But when it comes to police brutality i dont think there is color involved in it.. it's color blind.. just that at most times the lower strata of the societies where gang violence and crimes happen to be largely inner city area's with proportionately high black, Latino and other minorities are concentrated.. Thats just the way it is.
As for the OP issue on native American killings.. I think as many pointed out it's highly unlikely to have any racial connotations what so ever
I agree. Killings are probably more class related than race.