Nearly 43 percent of Spokane police shootings were Native Americans
by R. Bailey
Native Americans in Spokane, Washington, are alarmed at how frequent and inhumane their encounters with the Spokane Police Department ("SPD") have become. Of the seven officer shootings by the SPD in 2017, three were Native Americans, and two of the three were fatal.
Joshua Spotted Horse was among those killed in 2017. Then his dead, shirtless handcuffed body remained exposed for hours in the streets. Onlookers were allowed to snap photos of his corpse and display them on social media.
This wasn’t SPD’s first mistreatment of Native Americans killed by its officers. In 2003, SPD killed Eagle Michael, a 15-year-old hearing-impaired boy, and also left his dead body exposed in the streets for hours.
Ed Byrnes, a professor at Eastern Washington University, concluded that Native Americans made up 2.5 percent of SPD’s stops in 2014, but 9.3 percent of its uses of force. Also, that 6.2 Native Americans are detained in its county jail per every white person is evidence of disparate treatment of Native Americans, critics say.
Toni Lodge, executive director of the NATIVE project, noted the disparity in treatment by the media. Lodge conceded that data from a 30-month timeframe showed that 635 African-Americans were killed by law enforcement while 53 Native Americans were killed, a ratio of 12:1. However, African-American deaths were covered 3,992 times compared with 42 times for Native Americans, a ratio of 95:1.
Even the death of Arfee, a black Labrador retriever in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, sparked a 100-person march, emails to the mayor, and a cry for removal of the shooting officer. Meanwhile, the shooting death of Jeanetta Riley, a suicidal Native American woman, just 14 hours earlier, was barely mentioned in the media.
Lodge called the treatment of Native Americans an epidemic that warrants outrage but is instead excused as an anomaly or justified shooting. She is calling for an acknowledgement that a problem exists between law enforcement and Native Americans.
Source: Inlander.com
As a digital subscriber to Criminal Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login
