It’s not, then, just about this police shooting. It’s also a reaction to the 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s about the US Department of Justice investigation, released in 2017, which found that the Chicago Police Department repeatedly used excessive force and often treated people, particularly minorities, “as animals or subhuman.” And it’s the decades of incidents before that, including a scheme under which a police detective tortured hundreds of people to force confessions out of them. [...]
This is reflective of the broader national story with Black Lives Matter since 2014: While one incident may trigger protests — like the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or Tamir Rice in Cleveland — the fallout speaks to a much longer history. And that history involves not just police killings of black people but also other abuses, from petty traffic stops to downright torture, hand in hand with a lack of police attention to black communities when they actually need the help of law enforcement. [...]
In the days since the shooting, the police department has defended its officers, noting in a July 15 press conference that Augustus was armed and that he did not have a concealed carry permit for his weapon. Community members and activists meanwhile, have countered that the mere presence of a gun does not justify the shooting. They noted that Augustus was licensed to own a firearm and that it would be impossible for officers to know about Augustus’s lack of a permit when the initial stop occurred. [...]
Local activists and policing experts alike have noted that there are a lot of things still unanswered when it comes to the Augustus shooting. One of the first is exactly why Augustus was stopped for appearing to be armed, given that the state allows for concealed carry. Activists have also noted that video of the shooting shows Augustus attempting to pull what looks like an Illinois Firearm Owners’ Identification card from his wallet shortly before being grabbed by an officer, leading them to question why the interaction escalated so quickly. [...]
For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts. The Justice Department described this as an example of how “residents in black neighborhoods suffer more of the harms caused by breakdowns in uses of force, training, supervision, accountability, and community policing” routinely seen across the police department.
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