Large fire burns outside Brighton Park paper recycling plant

The wind-blown fire started in a prairie after 4 p.m. Tuesday and "spread really fast" to the yard of the paper plant, Chicago fire officials said.

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The pain of Floyd’s death “is still scarred into our minds and yet history continues to repeat itself,” the statement continued. “Our community has reached its breaking point.” This past week the mayor of Chicago called for calm as “excruciating” body camera footage was released in the police killing of the 13-year-old, Adam Toledo. The shaky video shows a police officer, responding to a call of shots fired, chasing a boy with what appears to be a gun down an alley at night in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. “Stop right now!” the officer screams while cursing. “Hands. Show me your hands. Drop it. Drop it.” A single shot fells the boy as he turns, lifting his hands. Other recent lethal force incidents have rocked communities large and small: Michael Leon Hughes, 32, a Black man shot to death March 30 after, police say, he used a Taser on a Jacksonville police officer responding to a domestic dispute in a motel; Iremamber Sykap, 16, a Pacific Islander killed April 5 as he fled from the Honolulu police in a stolen Honda Civic; and Anthony Thompson Jr., 17, a Black teenager in Knoxville, Tennessee, killed by the police April 12 in a high school bathroom after reports that a student had brought a gun onto campus. All of those killings and many more occurred as testimony in the Minneapolis trial unfolded, though few attracted as much national attention as the shooting of Wright less than 10 miles from the courthouse where Chauvin stood trial. Protests erupted in Brooklyn Center after a veteran police officer fatally shot Wright, saying she mistook her gun for her Taser as he attempted to flee during a traffic stop. 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It’s all of these things that are vitally important to stability of a community.” That instability often places officers in situations in which they confront individuals who may be dangerous and noncompliant, he said. Part of the reason society has been unable to prevent deadly encounters between law enforcement and the community is that some people are unwilling to discuss the real challenges of crime that officers sometimes encounter, he said. “There’s just so many factors that people have already made up their minds and they think that law enforcement is based off of race,” said Yoes, who is white. Federal and state laws generally hold that officers are justified in using lethal force as long as they have a “reasonable” fear of “imminent” injury or death for themselves or another person. And jurors tend not to second-guess what might be “reasonable” force in the moment. Of the 64 fatal encounters compiled by the Times for the past three weeks, at least 42 involved people accused of wielding firearms. More than a dozen involved confrontations with people who were mentally ill or in the throes of a breakdown. And at least 10 arose as the police responded to reports of domestic violence. Some dispute the notion that danger, rather than bias, is more likely to drive a law enforcement officer’s reactions. “What I see sometimes is, in these encounters with people of color, there is a different aggression,” said Ron Johnson, a retired Missouri State Highway Patrol captain who led the police response in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. “This adrenaline starts going out of the roof,” added Johnson, who is Black. “And why? It’s because we don’t have these experiences and these understandings of each other. And in some cases, it’s about humanity. We don’t see them in the same human way that we see ourselves.” Since at least 2013, with a slight dip because of the pandemic, about 1,100 people have been killed each year by law enforcement officers, according to databases compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group that examines all such killings, including non-gun-related deaths such as Floyd’s. The Washington Post, whose numbers are limited to police shootings, reflect a similarly flat trend line. Nearly all the victims since March 29 have been men, with Black or Latino people substantially overrepresented — a pattern that reflects broader criminal justice research. And most were younger than 30. Four were teenagers. Philip Stinson, a professor in the criminal justice program at Bowling Green State University who studies civilian killings by members of law enforcement, said the most striking aspect of the statistics on lethal police force is how little the numbers have changed in the decade or two since researchers began to comprehensively track them. Even as cellphone videos and body cameras make it harder to hide human error and abuses of authority by law enforcement — and even as social media amplifies public outrage — only about 1.1% of officers who kill civilians are charged with murder or manslaughter, Stinson said. Since the beginning of 2005, he said, 140 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers — such as police officers, deputy sheriffs and state troopers — have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting. Of those, 44 have been convicted of a crime resulting from the incident, in most cases for a lesser offense. 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Body camera footage shows members of the Windsor Police Department threatening and attacking Nazario, who is Black and Latino, after stopping him because he had not yet put permanent license plates on his new Chevrolet Tahoe. The footage underscores the extent to which police culture has resisted change in much of the country, Stinson said. “We only know about this one because he has a lawyer, they filed a civil lawsuit, and they were able to get recordings they could release,” he said. For many victims of police violence and their families, however, there is no video evidence to rely on. Daly City, California, police officers were not wearing body cameras when they got into a struggle with Roger Allen, 44, as he sat in a car idled with a flat tire April 7. The officers say that Allen had what appeared to be a gun on his lap, according to Stephen Wagstaffe, the San Mateo County district attorney, who is investigating the case. It turned out to be a pellet gun, but an officer fired a fatal bullet to Allen’s chest during the fracas. Now Talika Fletcher, 30, said she was struggling to come to terms with the fact that her older brother, who was like a father figure, had joined the grim tally of Black men who died at the hands of law enforcement. “I never thought in a million years that my brother would be a hashtag,” she said. She has little faith that the dynamic between Black men and law enforcement will be any better once her 14-month-old son, Prince, grows up. “The cycle,” she said, “it’s not going change.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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