The call came through Officer Geoffrey Freemans radio a few minutes before 10 a.m. on Feb. 8.
Complaint that somebody jumped a fence and tried to chase a neighbor, the police dispatcher in Austin, Texas, said. Black male, tall, thin, wearing jeans, boxers.
The dispatcher left Freeman with a final detail.
No weapons, she can be heard saying just before the call, later released to the public, cuts out.
Freeman headed toward the disturbance, which was taking place in a pocket of suburbia a couple of miles north of the University of Texas at Austin campus.
The last of a series of 911 calls relayed to Freeman reported a totally nude black male in the area. Freeman, a 10-year veteran of the force, called for additional units and continued his search.
Sounds like this guy could either be ... 10-86 [subject with mental illness] and losing it or high or something, he told dispatch, according to a memo later published by Austins Citizen Review Panel.
Within half an hour of arriving, Freeman found what he was looking for. He exited his cruiser and confronted David Joseph, who was completely naked and standing in the middle of the street.
After just seconds of verbal contact, Joseph, a 17-year-old known to his friends as Pronto, lay dying on the asphalt. Freeman had shot him through the heart.
Medical examiners would officially describe Joseph as African-American, 5 feet 7 inches tall and 146 pounds. Freeman, 46 years old and also black, stood at the same height, but was nearly 100 pounds heavier than the teen. A toxicology report later found traces of marijuana, the prescription drug Xanax and an antihistamine in Josephs system. Its still unclear what drove him to strip off his clothes and run around the neighborhood.
Joseph is one of the nearly 300 people police have shot and killed so far this year, according to The Washington Posts unofficial tally. And like the rest of the names on that list, youre probably not familiar with Joseph or his story.
There was no mention of Joseph on CNN, Fox News or MSNBC on the day he died, or on any day since, according to a Huffington Post review of programming. Instead, cable news gleefully reported that Donald Trump had called his Republican opponent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz a pussy. The schoolyard insult prompted numerous segments, including experts speculating on whether the billionaires vulgarity would sink his candidacy. (It didnt.)
There have been at least 20 cases in which cops have shot unarmed civilians to death this year, and a HuffPost examination of cable news transcripts found that the major cable news networks have not covered any of them.
I have yet to speak with a single person on 10 college campuses who has correctly identified any of the victims, Shaun King, an activist and criminal justice reporter for the New York Daily News, wrote in a column earlier this month. The hashtags and trending topics of police brutality victims that were once a staple from coast to coast have all but disappeared.
Although the medias interest in police shootings may have changed, the broad outlines of many of the cases havent. According to Freeman, Joseph didnt comply with his commands to stop, and instead turned and charged. Freeman claimed he feared for his life and had to resort to lethal force, even though he was also equipped with a Taser, pepper spray and a baton. Josephs family said the teen needed help, not a bullet to the chest.
Similar accounts fueled controversy in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as other cities including New York City, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago over the past two years. And like those cases, Josephs shooting raises many of the same questions about law enforcements use of force, training, racial biases and the ability to hold officers accountable for catastrophic misjudgment or misconduct.
Unlike in those cases, however, Joseph has not become a household name or part of a rallying cry in the fight against police violence.
And hes not alone in his relative anonymity. Although police reform is still on many peoples minds including the journalists who continue to cover it mainstream reporting on the issue seems to have shifted away from telling the stories behind the climbing death toll.
Instead, the media has turned its sights to the heated presidential election, burning through the oxygen that had given life to stories about police brutality and reform.
The election has distracted people and, even worse, the media has just given in to the lowest common denominator to cover every crazy and outrageous thing Trump says at the expense of actually covering issues and concerns, Sarah Oates, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, told HuffPost.
Its not that wall-to-wall coverage of the presidential election has completely undercut the conversation about policing in America. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have both reached out to the families of victims of police violence, even recruiting some of them as surrogates. And theyve both made sweeping though perhaps unrealistic promises to enact police reform if elected president. But in the midst of a contentious primary season, theyve stopped using new examples to illustrate the critical importance of the issue.
The focus was less abstract last year. Police fatally shot 109 unarmed civilians in 2015, according to The Guardians unofficial tally, a steady drumbeat of bloodshed accentuated by higher-profile incidents that dominated headlines for days. National attention helped amplify the existing local activism, and under the klieg lights, city and state officials felt pressure to listen to the demands for accountability, transparency and change.
Video footage played an integral role in building that storyline. Last year, the public had little choice but to watch as bystander video of an officer opening fire on a fleeing 50-year-old Walter Scott was broadcast on repeat around the nation. In the days that passed between the Scott shooting and the release of the footage, law enforcement tried to portray the incident as a reasonable use of force. The four-minute cell phone video unwound that narrative, and eventually led prosecutors to charge the officer with murder.
In the cases from this year that HuffPost analyzed, however, there have so far been no publicly released videos clearly showing the shootings no visual evidence to further force Americans to take a hard look at police violence and potentially challenge the notion that officers are always right. And considering that police are still killing people frequently in incidents that often sound troublingly familiar its possible that the public has developed a higher threshold for outrage.
While Clinton and Sanders have been less outspoken about issues of police violence this year, they didnt hesitate to get involved last year. In fact, both candidates appeared to make a point of saying the names of people killed by police, channeling a cause promoted by activists aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But now that Clinton and Sanders are trying to win over voters and build their national appeal, Oates says theyre taking a more delicate approach.
It allows them to get some votes hopefully without alienating the white majority, she said of the candidates overtures on police reform. Theyre kind of stuck between people who dont ever want to hear the police criticized and people who really want to say theres a real problem with the power thats given to police versus the rights of the citizens.
This shift cant be chalked up entirely to a campaign-obsessed media that thrives on vapid political coverage. If theres one upside to this trend, its that police are so far killing fewer unarmed people this year than they were in 2015. But were just months into 2016, and weve still seen a number of disturbing incidents that under different circumstances, might have resonated beyond the local level.
Take the case of Antronie Scott, a 36-year-old black man who was shot and killed by San Antonio Police Officer John Lee in February, just days before Josephs fatal shooting. Lee found Scott, who was wanted on two felony charges, sitting in the parking lot of his girlfriends apartment complex. According to Lee, Scott made a sudden turn after he stepped out of his car. Lee says he thought he saw a gun.
It was a cell phone.
Activists in San Antonio held rallies calling for justice, but Scotts story still failed to permeate the national news cycle. Mike Lowe, a local Black Lives Matter activist, attributes part of this to the fact that the demonstrations there were less disruptive than major protests in Ferguson, Baltimore and Chicago.
A lot of individuals may not be rebellious or have that spirit of protest in them to be like, Were just going to occupy the streets until justice happens, he said.
Those more confrontational attitudes have paid dividends in other cities, Lowe said. But he says politicians in San Antonio take pride in the fact that the city isnt like its peers. After Scotts shooting, Mayor Ivy Taylor, who is black, said in a statement that it was important for San Antonio to not compare itself and the killing of Scott to what has happened elsewhere.
Every city or town also has its own context, she said. I will not allow our citys story to be that of cities we see on the national news.
Politicizing this incident and putting it in the context of whats happening in other cities is not the solution just as reverting to 20th-century police techniques or protesting the very meetings that seek to provide the opportunity for constructive dialogue is not the solution, Taylor added.
The mayor sat down with activists to discuss their concerns, and San Antonios chief of police said in early March that Lee would be fired. Weeks later, however, he reversed course, saying Lee would face no disciplinary action beyond additional training. Taylor quickly announced that she supported his decision.
Long article worth reading.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/police-shootings-2016_us_5713d98ae4b0018f9cba52d1
