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Mint
2 days ago
- Mint
The rapid rise of killings by police in rural America
Gina Via thought she saw an elk as she drove through the high desert of southern New Mexico one night last summer. As she drew closer, she realized it was a person walking dangerously close to the road. She decided to call 911. Jacob Diaz-Austin, one of a few sheriff's deputies patrolling Otero County's 6,627 square miles, took the dispatcher's call for a welfare check on a possibly intoxicated pedestrian. He switched on his lights, cranked up the volume to the club hit 'In da Getto," and sped to the scene, topping 120 miles an hour, according to audio and video recordings obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The deputy slowed, stopped, and focused his spotlight on Elijah Hadley, a 17-year-old walking along the median near his home on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Fearful after getting beaten up the day before, Hadley carried a BB gun. Within minutes, Diaz-Austin fired approximately 22 shots at Hadley. He shot four times just after Hadley dropped the BB gun. A few minutes later, Diaz-Austin shot Hadley about 18 more times as he lay on the ground. Diaz-Austin now faces a first-degree murder charge. He has pleaded not guilty. Last year, 1,260 people were killed by law enforcement—the highest level since data-crunching organizations began keeping track a decade ago. A major factor driving the upward trend is surprising: Sheriff's departments that generally patrol more rural slices of America are killing more civilians. Sheriff's departments, which generally have jurisdiction over counties, were involved in about a third of the police killings in 2024, despite making up just a quarter of law-enforcement nationwide, according to the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. Killings by sheriffs rose 43% from 2013, while that number rose 3% for police departments, which patrol cities and towns. The numbers speak to a widening gap between urban and rural law enforcement since the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sent floods of protesters into the streets of American cities. Big-city departments faced pressure to dial back aggressive practices and adopt changes to reduce shootings by officers. Sheriffs—most elected in partisan races, unlike police chiefs—have long espoused a tough law-and-order approach that is supported by their constituents. Particularly as violence spiked nationwide during the pandemic, sheriff's departments were quick to unleash forceful tactics to tamp down unrest. 'Sheriffs will typically be more proactive, which entails my deputies being more inclined to use violence to overcome violence," said Chad Bianco, the Republican sheriff of Riverside County in Southern California. When protests broke out last month over Trump's immigration crackdown, some sheriffs issued tough public warnings to demonstrators. 'If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains," said Brevard County, Fla.'s Republican Sheriff Wayne Ivey. 'We will kill you, graveyard dead." The White House endorses this muscular stance. In late April, sheriffs surrounded President Trump as he signed an executive order titled 'Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens." The order encourages law enforcement to 'aggressively police communities against all crimes" and calls for strengthening legal protections for officers. Sheriff's deputies often patrol alone, with backup miles away. That is why Glenn Hamilton, the former sheriff of Sierra County, N.M., (population 11,000) describes rural policing as 'one riot, one ranger." But the changing nature of policing rural America is testing these solitary, do-it-all deputies. Economic decline, coupled with drug and mental-health crises, force them to contend with problems historically associated with big cities. About 14% of killings by sheriffs last year arose from mental-health crisis calls, such as armed suicidal men turning guns on deputies. Some 28% involved violent crimes such as robberies, shootings and stabbings. Nearly three-quarters of those killed carried guns, knives or other weapons. Deputies confront this new reality with less preparation than their big-city counterparts. Rural sheriff's departments often lack the time, money or interest to offer advanced courses—such as in de-escalating mental-health crises—that have helped some city police reduce shootings. 'Big-city departments were ahead of the sheriffs" on de-escalation training, said Volusia County, Fla., Sheriff Mike Chitwood, who instituted the training after being elected in 2016. 'It was hard to convince my organization that had the mentality of shoot first and ask questions later." Sheriff's departments require an average of 38 annual in-service training hours, versus the 46 required by city police, according to the most recent federal data. They are also less likely to have officers specializing in mental health and crisis intervention. A view of U.S. Highway 70 from Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Bent, N.M., near where a woman called 911 to report someone walking dangerously close to the road. Lower salaries hinder sheriffs' ability to attract experienced and qualified candidates. Last year, Ohio's Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office sparked controversy by hiring the '$9 million cop," a local city police officer who left after being sued twice for shootings that led to large settlements, earning him the nickname in the local media. Two years earlier, the officer had shot and killed a suicidal man from 482 feet away, using a sniper rifle while the man held a shotgun that officers on the scene believed to be unloaded. The officer later complained to state police interviewing him that 'everyone's been griping about de-escalation." He was cleared of wrongdoing. In Hot Springs County, Wyo., where cows outnumber people, sheriff's deputies have long been called upon to clear cattle from the highway. But in recent years, they have also become front-line mental-health responders in the rural U.S., which faces acute shortages of mental-health workers, a significant increase in suicide rates and other problems. In 2023, a man attacked and threatened to kill two deputies. Last September, Jared Gottula, 41, unemployed and suffering from untreated mental illness, stood outside waving a baseball bat. A first officer ordered Gottula to drop it, but Gottula charged at the officer's SUV, according to video of the incident. The officer rammed Gottula, who didn't let go of the bat. Hot Springs County Sheriff's Deputy Max Lee-Crain drew his gun and shouted: 'Get on the ground now! Don't make me shoot you!" Gottula asked, 'Why are you here?" When a Taser failed, Gottula advanced toward Lee-Crain, who fired until he ran out of bullets. Gottula's father rushed to his son's body, wailing, 'Is he dead?" The fatal shooting jolted the quiet county of 4,600, known for thermal pools and fly-fishing. Sheriff Jerimie Kraushaar couldn't recall another officer-involved shooting in the department's history. A prosecutor ruled the shooting justified, noting Gottula 'simply would not stop the violence." Now, the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police is pushing for more officers to undergo 40 hours of mental-health crisis training. Even with de-escalation efforts, the scarcity of behavioral-health services in rural Wyoming makes prevention difficult, said Executive Director Allen Thompson. 'Where we struggle is preventing that from happening the next night and next." Since the George Floyd protests, big-metro mayors have ordered their police to move away from what they call 'fear-based, warrior style" training. But sheriffs didn't back away. There was no pressure to do so. While demonstrators marched in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles with calls to defund the police, rural residents held 'Back the Blue" rallies. In New Mexico's Otero County, stretching from the White Sands Missile Range to nearly the Mexico border, hundreds turned out with signs like 'We Support our Brothers and Sisters in Blue." Sheriff David Black told a local reporter he appreciated the support because 'law enforcement has been getting beat up a little bit, getting a bad rap." The exterior of the Otero County Sheriff's Office in Alamogordo, N.M. Black, a taciturn cowboy-hatted lawman, was popular in the conservative county of 70,000—the birthplace of 'Cowboys for Trump." In recent years, he fought rising crime he blamed on drugs from Mexico and often complained about a shortage of deputies. Black didn't respond to requests for comment. Black's deputies and sergeants regularly train with the Force Science Institute, an organization that fell out of favor with some city departments for promoting what critics call a 'shoot first" mentality. The group's training—which stresses how quickly suspects can pull a gun and fire—teaches officers to 'shoot first and often, and then provides them with the tools to justify those shootings after the tragic fact," the American Civil Liberties Union has said. Von Kliem, chief consulting officer at Force Science Institute, said the group's training emphasizes that when officers do have time they should use it to work toward voluntary compliance—but recognizes that 'some situations require officers to act swiftly to prevent harm." Otero County has paid for half a dozen sergeants and deputies to train with Force Science over the past two years, sending them to sessions as far as away as Seattle and Columbus, Ohio, according to documents obtained by the Journal. The sheriff didn't respond to questions about whether Deputy Diaz-Austin—who graduated from the academy in 2021—received this training. Diaz-Austin's lawyer didn't respond to requests for comment. New Mexico civil-rights attorney Shannon Kennedy, who looked into the instruction while involved in a lawsuit against a nearby agency, believes Eljah Hadley's shooting bore all the hallmarks. 'It's this high-octane poison which pumps officers to act as opposed to following traditional training, which is communication and cover and distance are your friends," Kennedy said. 'That's why you see what happened in Otero County." Kliem disputed the characterization. 'Far from encouraging aggressive behavior, our instruction emphasizes professional judgment, tactical patience, and effective communication skills," he said. Elijah Hadley grew up roaming the vast, mountainous Mescalero Apache reservation. He learned to hunt and skin deer from his uncle. He helped dig the giant pit for the tribe's annual mescal roast. Elijah Hadley gathering elk antlers. Hadley's friends described him as having a 'chill vibe that was contagious," according to a letter provided by the family's attorney. His principal said he was respectful, noting he always addressed her with 'yes ma'am." He excelled at art, placing third in a statewide competition in 2023. His welding teacher let him paint the walls of the school's shop. Heading into his senior year, he talked about joining the military like his brother and also becoming a tattoo artist. 'We all felt like he had a good chance of making a good life for himself through his art," his friends said in a letter. That night on the highway, Hadley shielded his eyes from the deputy's spotlight with one hand and kept the other under his shirt. Diaz-Austin demanded to see his hand. Dashcam video footage showed Hadley withdrawing his hand with what appeared to be a handgun, then holding it upside down between his finger and thumb before tossing it. Diaz-Austin started shooting. 'It's just a BB gun!" Hadley yelled as he convulsed on the ground. 'It's just a BB gun!" Murals adorn the concrete barriers along U.S. Highway 70 in Mescalero, N.M. Frantic and breathing hard, the deputy ran to the passenger side of the car and grabbed a first-aid kit but didn't use it. Instead, he stood near his car, screaming at Hadley to stay still. Three minutes later, the teen's bloodied, twitching body rolled over. 'Don't go to that gun!" Diaz-Austin shouted. He fired repeatedly at the prone teenager until his weapon emptied. He reloaded and kept shooting, approximately 18 times in all, until Hadley stopped moving. A week later, during an interview with state police, Diaz-Austin said he thought Hadley was going to shoot him. 'I was in fear," Diaz-Austin said. 'He was just staring at me and had this really sinister smile on his face." Elijah Hadley, in baseball cap, at a celebration for his brother, who enlisted in the Army in 2021. The video doesn't show Hadley staring or smiling. Diaz-Austin told state police he believed Hadley was reaching for the gun on the ground—and that the teenager actually had the gun at one point. The body camera video footage shows neither. Anguish spread among Hadley's friends and family. Sheriff Black didn't immediately release video footage—something many police agencies do today—or offer any public explanation beyond a short, vague press release saying an 'interaction resulted in an officer-involved shooting." When local television aired footage of the shooting, anger erupted. 'Not my brother. He didn't f—ing deserve this!" Hadley's sister wrote on Facebook. 'Shot 4 times on the ground for more than three minutes…. more than 15 times after that!!" Elijah Hadley, who played for his high-school football team, with his mother, Eva. A small group began protesting regularly at the sheriff's office. When they presented their concerns to the county commission in August, Sheriff Black skipped his regular appearance at the monthly meeting. Though Black made no formal announcement, his office had declared the shooting justified by September. Diaz-Austin was back on the job, patrolling Otero County. But an independent prosecutor's office assigned to the case disagreed, and charged Diaz-Austin with first degree murder this January. 'This was an absolute tragedy," said Sam Bregman, the Bernalillo County District Attorney. The shooting has opened a deep fissure in the community. At Diaz-Austin's court hearings in Otero County, fellow deputies stationed in the courtroom in an official capacity laugh and joke with him, says Christopher Dodd, an attorney for Hadley's family, who recently filed a federal lawsuit against the deputy and the county. Outside the courtroom, Hadley's friends view the sheriff's office differently. 'We wonder if we could be next?" they wrote in a letter. 'We wonder if we can ever trust police officers again?" The memorial site for Elijah Hadley in the median along U.S. Highway 70. Write to Zusha Elinson at
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Since George Floyd's Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling
After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved fatal to those in custody. Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers. Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, 'I can't breathe.' Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Mr. Floyd's famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments around the country, especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd's murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson's death.) Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes for those deaths. Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Mr. Stinson said that given 'all of the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn't changed.' Experts say it is difficult to draw definitive answers from the data about why police killings continue to rise without an analysis of the circumstances of each case. But they have plenty of theories about what may have contributed to the problem. An increasing number of guns in circulation heightens the chances of deadly encounters. A backlash against the police reform movement in conservative states may have empowered the police in those places. And the decline in public trust in the police after Mr. Floyd's murder may have led to more deadly encounters. 'Public perception of policing can matter here,' said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is a law professor at the University of South Carolina and frequently testifies about use-of-force policies in criminal trials of officers. 'When police are viewed as more legitimate, folks are more likely to comply. When police are viewed as less legitimate, people are less likely to comply and more likely to resist, and that can increase the rates of violence.' While answers may be elusive, here are some of the underlying trends that might explain the shifting nature of police violence in the United States. After Mr. Floyd's killing, many Democratic-run states and cities made more robust changes to policing. And culturally, in more-liberal states, there were much louder calls for the police to be reined in. This might help explain why there is a growing divide in where people are being killed by the police. In more-liberal states, the rate has stabilized, but in more-conservative ones, the numbers have risen. If measured over the last 10 years, since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 sparked wide-scale protests, fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15 percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Mr. Floyd's death. But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings. Christina Beeler, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said officials across that state had resisted efforts to make police departments more accountable and transparent. 'The pendulum has swung back and, in some ways, has gone further than where it was before,' she said. Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of Mr. Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent. The numbers have fluctuated over the years, but have dropped significantly since 2015, when 152 people killed by the police were unarmed. In 2020, that number was 95, and last year, it dropped to 53. The number of people killed while wielding replica weapons, fake guns that look like the real thing, has also dropped. Still, experts were split on why the drop may have occurred and how much weight to give the data. They said it was one of several statistics that would benefit from a more comprehensive national database of police use of force. Some suggested the decrease in the number of unarmed people being killed could be a natural outcome in a country where a large percentage of people own guns. It is difficult to evaluate gun ownership in the United States, but polls have shown that more than 40 percent of adults report having a gun in their household. 'In a world in which we are awash in guns, and getting more awash, that's what's going to happen,' said Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University's law school who specializes in policing. Others were more skeptical. Justin Nix, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, said he hoped that the data was a reflection of improvements in policing and training, but that he was hesitant to draw any conclusions. That's in part because of how rare police killings of unarmed people are and the fluctuating number of cases where it is unclear whether the person who was killed had a weapon. Mr. Nix, whose focus is on criminology and criminal justice, said the difficulty in interpreting the data was indicative of a larger problem, which is that data on police force and killings remains sparse. For example, he noted, there is very little data on police shootings in which a person is not killed. One study estimated that there were roughly 800 of these nonfatal shootings each year. Despite the rise in the overall number of police killings, legislators across the country have rolled back several attempts to reduce police violence. In Washington State, lawmakers passed an initiative last year that rolled back a law, passed in 2021, that had imposed limits on when the police could chase suspects in their cars. This year, Alabama enacted a new law seeking to make it harder to prosecute or sue police officers. Oregon in 2022 loosened the standard for when the police could use tear gas after tightening regulations just a year earlier. The federal government, under the Trump administration, has also pulled back from holding law enforcement agencies accountable. This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at 'unleashing' law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to 'provide legal resources' to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing. Mr. Nix, the criminal justice professor in Nebraska, said the demands of constituents had changed in many places since the immediate aftermath of Mr. Floyd's death. 'The climate is perceived as a little bit more friendly to policing,' he said. 'Things that are perceived as unnecessarily tying the hands of police, you're going to see those get rolled back.' On the other hand, Mr. Nix said, many changes — including the use of body cameras, transparency measures and training on de-escalation — are focused on a broader range of goals than reducing police killings. Some, for example, train the police in better empathizing with those they encounter. 'In the aggregate, that spells better police-citizen interactions,' he said. But he said any significant reduction in the number of people killed by the police would require doing more than just focusing on department policies and involve a host of 'societal factors that go way beyond the police.'
American Military News
07-05-2025
- American Military News
Colorado police shot someone every 6 days in 2024, data shows
The first call came from her nephew. Then, news stations started reaching out, asking how she felt that the Aurora police officer responsible for her son's death had not been charged. 'Right there, I swore to myself at that moment that I would never stop fighting until we got justice,' LaRonda Jones, the mother of Kilyn Lewis, said. 'I will continue to fight even harder — not only for justice in my son's death, but for all those other parents, all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents, who have gone through the same thing I'm going through.' Colorado police officers and sheriff's deputies shot someone roughly every six days in 2024, according to data compiled by The Denver Post. They killed 39 people, including Lewis, and wounded 22 others, for a total of 61. That's down four shootings from 2023, when law enforcement killed 43 Coloradans and injured another 22. Colorado still ranked eighth in the country last year for fatal police shootings per capita, with 6.93 people killed per million residents, according to national data from Mapping Police Violence. Black people were disproportionately killed by law enforcement in Colorado — a trend that persists across the country, according to the organization's data on deadly police shootings — and one law enforcement agency saw a 250% increase in police shootings between 2023 and 2024. Lewis, a 37-year-old Black man, was unarmed and holding a cellphone when Aurora police officers shot him in the parking lot of an apartment complex last May. He was shot within six seconds of officers surrounding him and shouting commands. Lewis was wanted on suspicion of attempted first-degree murder in a separate Aurora shooting earlier that month. 'Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed,' Mapping Police Violence's 2024 report stated. 'Police disproportionately kill Black people, year after year.' Who did Colorado law enforcement shoot? The majority of people shot and killed by law enforcement in both 2023 and 2024 were white men armed with guns, according to the data compiled by The Post. However, Black Coloradans were overrepresented in the data, which includes information from law enforcement agencies, coroner's offices and national databases. Nearly 13% of people killed by Colorado law enforcement in 2024 were Black, but Black people make up less than 4% of the state's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The percentage of Black Coloradans shot by law enforcement could be even higher, said Julie Ward, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies public policy and gun violence, including police shootings. 'When we include both fatal and injury shootings nationally, it appears that racial disparities may actually be worse than we thought,' Ward said. 'If we're only looking at fatal shootings, then we're disregarding more injuries to Black survivors.' The Post was unable to run a similar analysis because of the lack of demographic information available on people who were shot by Colorado law enforcement agents but survived. The federal government has never successfully mandated that law enforcement agencies report use-of-force incidents, leaving many researchers to rely on coverage from local media, said Andrea Borrego, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Some states, including Colorado, have started requiring comprehensive reporting, but that doesn't always work, she said. Colorado's Law Enforcement Integrity Act requires the Division of Criminal Justice's Office of Research and Statistics to report data submitted by state and local law enforcement on citizen contacts and use of force. However, no data was yet available for 2024, and the office's database only recorded 20 instances in 2023 in which an officer or deputy fired a gun at a suspect. That's a 45-case gap between the state's data and what The Post recorded in 2023. 'It's very apparent what is happening to our community, but … it goes beyond the data. It goes beyond the research and the studies,' said MiDian Shofner, CEO of the Denver-based Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership. 'There are things about these stories that are not reported, and that, I think, is where I can say that our community knows that this is a reality.' She said the data doesn't show the insults hurled at the families when they try to 'be a voice for their loved ones' — including an instance when Aurora City Councilwoman Stephanie Hancock called Lewis's family and other community organizers 'a bunch of bullies, terrorists, anarchists, opportunists, provocateurs and others who want to lift their voices so they can get social media clicks' — or how law enforcement agencies often shut them out. 'Those are data points they don't have a system for,' Shofner said. 'That hurt, that pain, that reality goes beyond any research in any study.' Frank Powels, 44; Kristin Dock, 32; Everett Shockley, 42; and Kory Dillard, 38, were all Black men also killed in 2024 by law enforcement in Broomfield, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties. Powels, Dock and Shockley were armed — two with guns and one with a broken broomstick handle — but Dillard was holding a replica Airsoft rifle. 'You don't get a chance to redo this scene and this act over again,' Jones, Lewis's mother, said. 'When you take a life, that's it. There's no coming back from that. And that's what we're facing and dealing with every day.' The Douglas and Adams County coroners declined to release victim names and demographic information to The Post, leaving the ages, races and genders of 15% of people killed by law enforcement in 2024 and 14% in 2023 unknown. Other findings by The Post include: —Despite making up nearly 70% of Colorado's population, 50% of people shot and killed by state law enforcement in 2024 were white. —Three women in 2023 and two women in 2024 were fatally shot by Colorado law enforcement. That's 7% and 5% of all victims killed in each of those years. —About 32% of people shot and killed by police in 2023 were Hispanic, though they make up 23% of Colorado's population. In 2024, 23% of fatal police shooting victims were Hispanic. —At least three people shot in 2023 and five people shot in 2024 were unarmed or not reported to be armed by law enforcement. —At least five people shot in 2023 and six in 2024 were suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis. —Roughly 67% of those shot and killed by police in 2024 were adults under the age of 45. That age group only makes up 37% of Colorado's population, according to federal data. —At least 17 people shot by police in 2024 were fleeing law enforcement in their car or on foot, up from 11 in 2023. Another 10 police shootings stemmed from traffic stops in 2024, more than double the four traffic stop shootings documented in 2023. —The most common calls that escalated into police shootings were disturbances, fights and reports of suspicious people, accounting for roughly a third of incidents in both 2023 and 2024. Of those calls, eight in 2023 and six in 2024 included allegations of domestic violence. —More than a dozen shootings each year — at least 17 in 2023 and 13 in 2024 — stemmed from officers trying to serve an arrest warrant or contact a suspect in a crime. A variety of factors impact police shootings — including specific law enforcement agencies' training of officers and use of force policies, local crime rates, firearm ownership, community diversity and which agencies are responsible for responding to mental health crises — so numbers are unpredictable from year to year. Across the country, the most frequent events that escalate into fatal police shootings involve verbal or physical threats, Ward said. That includes assaults, domestic violence incidents and people 'verbalizing threats of harm to themselves or others.' Police shootings escalating from well-being checks or other 'social needs' were less common across the country, but more likely to be lethal, she said. Ward said the data calls attention to an opportunity for a different response, where people should be able to think of police as a last resort when a 'better fit' solution isn't available. She said cities should invest in more targeted responses to these social needs to 'reduce exposure to the potential harms from policing.' Which departments had the most incidents? Eight Colorado law enforcement agencies saw significant increases in police shootings between 2023 and 2024, ranging from 50% to 250%. In total, 12 agencies that had zero incidents in 2023 documented at least one police shooting in 2024, according to The Post's data. On the other hand, 20 departments that had at least one police shooting in 2023 reported no incidents last year. Thornton police officers shot seven people in 2024, killing six of them. That's the highest of any Colorado law enforcement agency last year and a 250% increase from the two people shot in Thornton police in 2023. One Thornton officer was shot when a 27-year-old man resisted arrest and grabbed the officer's gun after reportedly assaulting someone at a nearby gas station. Another two officers were injured in an hours-long standoff and shootout that rattled Thornton's Orchard Farms subdivision and ended with the suspect dead. In each of Thornton's six fatal police shootings, the suspects were armed and had fired their weapons, though not necessarily at people, Division Cmdr. Tom Connor said. 'That is completely out of the norm for us, not somebody being armed in an officer-involved shooting, but having six in one year where that was the case. That's absolutely an anomaly,' Connor said. Under Colorado law, when possible, officers are required to give suspects a chance to comply and use nonlethal force if available, Connor said. Thornton officers did not attempt to use nonlethal force in any of the six fatal shootings, but Connor said the suspects escalated the situation. Connor said it can also be more dangerous for officers to use nonlethal force when people are armed because it doesn't immediately incapacitate them. He said it allows the armed suspect to continue to assault officers or others in the area. In the end, it comes down to a split-second decision, and officers must act to protect themselves or others in danger, Connor said. Thornton was followed closely in 2024 police shootings by Colorado Springs, where four people were killed and two were wounded; Aurora, where four people were killed and one was wounded; and Denver, where two people were killed and two were wounded. Pueblo and Lakewood police shot another three people in each city. Thornton's per-capita rate of 4.8 shootings per 100,000 residents in 2024 quadrupled Aurora's rate of 1.1 and was more than eight times Denver's rate of 0.55. 'In Aurora, according to the 2023 Use of Force Report, arrests and use-of-force incidents have risen every year since 2021, even as calls for service have steadily declined,' Cat Moring from the Denver Justice Project said in an emailed statement to The Post. 'This trend reflects internal policy decisions and a department culture that continues to prioritize force over community trust.' The Aurora Police Department was placed under a consent decree by state officials in 2021 after a Colorado Attorney General's Office investigation into Elijah McClain's killing found a pattern of racially biased policing and excessive force. 'Despite these reforms, the department has failed to rebuild trust, as evidenced by the decline in calls for police service,' Moring said. 'People are calling the police less because they fear dangerous encounters.' Leaving victims' families in the lurch 'Language is extremely important,' Shofner, the Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership CEO, said. 'Oftentimes, when this story is told and the narrative is put out, we'll say that the Black community doesn't trust the police. I don't think that's saying it the right way. It's that the police have lost the trust of the Black community.' Jones said the lack of trust also stems from the lack of information and communication from law enforcement agencies. She said the shortage of answers was one of the most difficult things to deal with after her son's shooting. As soon as Jones could after finding out about the shooting, she was on a plane from her home in Georgia to Colorado. Aurora officials called her while she was at the airport, but they could only direct her to the hospital and didn't know Lewis' status. 'It was really frustrating because I had a lot of questions that were unanswered,' Jones said. 'Questions like, 'Who was the officer who killed my son?' and 'What's going to be done about this?' So a lot of anger was building up as I couldn't get my questions answered.' Connor said investigators from Colorado's various Critical Incident Response Teams don't release information to the involved departments during the investigations into police shootings. At least for Thornton, whatever the department releases publicly after the shooting — including body camera footage — is all officials outside of the investigation know, he said. 'Any officer-involved shooting can affect public trust,' Connor said. 'There's the potential that it looks like (law enforcement) is hiding information from the public when, in reality, the majority of the time we're not entitled to the information.' But Jones said her struggle with the Aurora Police Department continued even after the investigation was closed and no charges were filed against SWAT officer Michael Dieck, who shot and killed her son. She said she was still continuously dismissed by the police department. What happened to the officers who shot people? Despite recent reforms, such as ending qualified immunity in state court, requiring body-worn cameras and mandating decertification for officers who engage in misconduct, the threshold for what counts as 'misconduct' remains extraordinarily high, Moring said. Moring said officers are rarely held accountable, and the families of police shooting victims are often left to pursue justice on their own. 'Families are still forced to choose between fighting for criminal charges or seeking civil remedies — rarely with the resources, support or capacity to do both,' she said. All but one of the 43 police shootings in 2023 for which The Post was able to obtain decision letters were ruled justified. La Salle police Officer Erik Hernandez took a deal and pleaded guilty in January to manslaughter after shooting and killing 38-year-old Juston Reffel in his car outside of a dollar store on May 3, 2023. No charges have been filed in any of the 2024 police shootings for which The Post has obtained copies of district attorneys' decision letters. Jones said she was not surprised when Arapahoe County District Attorney John Kellner decided not to file charges against Dieck, who shot and killed her son. Kellner said Dieck 'reasonably believed there was an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,' which justified the officer's use of force under Colorado law, according to Kellner's decision letter to the police department. 'There's no healing,' Jones said. 'Until we get justice, it won't even begin.' ___ © 2025 MediaNews Group, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Miami Herald
05-05-2025
- Miami Herald
Colorado police shot someone every 6 days in 2024, data shows
The first call came from her nephew. Then, news stations started reaching out, asking how she felt that the Aurora police officer responsible for her son's death had not been charged. "Right there, I swore to myself at that moment that I would never stop fighting until we got justice," LaRonda Jones, the mother of Kilyn Lewis, said. "I will continue to fight even harder - not only for justice in my son's death, but for all those other parents, all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents, who have gone through the same thing I'm going through." Colorado police officers and sheriff's deputies shot someone roughly every six days in 2024, according to data compiled by The Denver Post. They killed 39 people, including Lewis, and wounded 22 others, for a total of 61. That's down four shootings from 2023, when law enforcement killed 43 Coloradans and injured another 22. Colorado still ranked eighth in the country last year for fatal police shootings per capita, with 6.93 people killed per million residents, according to national data from Mapping Police Violence. Black people were disproportionately killed by law enforcement in Colorado - a trend that persists across the country, according to the organization's data on deadly police shootings - and one law enforcement agency saw a 250% increase in police shootings between 2023 and 2024. Lewis, a 37-year-old Black man, was unarmed and holding a cellphone when Aurora police officers shot him in the parking lot of an apartment complex last May. He was shot within six seconds of officers surrounding him and shouting commands. Lewis was wanted on suspicion of attempted first-degree murder in a separate Aurora shooting earlier that month. "Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed," Mapping Police Violence's 2024 report stated. "Police disproportionately kill Black people, year after year." Who did Colorado law enforcement shoot? The majority of people shot and killed by law enforcement in both 2023 and 2024 were white men armed with guns, according to the data compiled by The Post. However, Black Coloradans were overrepresented in the data, which includes information from law enforcement agencies, coroner's offices and national databases. Nearly 13% of people killed by Colorado law enforcement in 2024 were Black, but Black people make up less than 4% of the state's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The percentage of Black Coloradans shot by law enforcement could be even higher, said Julie Ward, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies public policy and gun violence, including police shootings. "When we include both fatal and injury shootings nationally, it appears that racial disparities may actually be worse than we thought," Ward said. "If we're only looking at fatal shootings, then we're disregarding more injuries to Black survivors." The Post was unable to run a similar analysis because of the lack of demographic information available on people who were shot by Colorado law enforcement agents but survived. The federal government has never successfully mandated that law enforcement agencies report use-of-force incidents, leaving many researchers to rely on coverage from local media, said Andrea Borrego, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Some states, including Colorado, have started requiring comprehensive reporting, but that doesn't always work, she said. Colorado's Law Enforcement Integrity Act requires the Division of Criminal Justice's Office of Research and Statistics to report data submitted by state and local law enforcement on citizen contacts and use of force. However, no data was yet available for 2024, and the office's database only recorded 20 instances in 2023 in which an officer or deputy fired a gun at a suspect. That's a 45-case gap between the state's data and what The Post recorded in 2023. "It's very apparent what is happening to our community, but … it goes beyond the data. It goes beyond the research and the studies," said MiDian Shofner, CEO of the Denver-based Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership. "There are things about these stories that are not reported, and that, I think, is where I can say that our community knows that this is a reality." She said the data doesn't show the insults hurled at the families when they try to "be a voice for their loved ones" - including an instance when Aurora City Councilwoman Stephanie Hancock called Lewis's family and other community organizers "a bunch of bullies, terrorists, anarchists, opportunists, provocateurs and others who want to lift their voices so they can get social media clicks" - or how law enforcement agencies often shut them out. "Those are data points they don't have a system for," Shofner said. "That hurt, that pain, that reality goes beyond any research in any study." Frank Powels, 44; Kristin Dock, 32; Everett Shockley, 42; and Kory Dillard, 38, were all Black men also killed in 2024 by law enforcement in Broomfield, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties. Powels, Dock and Shockley were armed - two with guns and one with a broken broomstick handle - but Dillard was holding a replica Airsoft rifle. "You don't get a chance to redo this scene and this act over again," Jones, Lewis's mother, said. "When you take a life, that's it. There's no coming back from that. And that's what we're facing and dealing with every day." The Douglas and Adams County coroners declined to release victim names and demographic information to The Post, leaving the ages, races and genders of 15% of people killed by law enforcement in 2024 and 14% in 2023 unknown. Other findings by The Post include: -Despite making up nearly 70% of Colorado's population, 50% of people shot and killed by state law enforcement in 2024 were white. -Three women in 2023 and two women in 2024 were fatally shot by Colorado law enforcement. That's 7% and 5% of all victims killed in each of those years. -About 32% of people shot and killed by police in 2023 were Hispanic, though they make up 23% of Colorado's population. In 2024, 23% of fatal police shooting victims were Hispanic. -At least three people shot in 2023 and five people shot in 2024 were unarmed or not reported to be armed by law enforcement. -At least five people shot in 2023 and six in 2024 were suicidal or experiencing a mental health crisis. -Roughly 67% of those shot and killed by police in 2024 were adults under the age of 45. That age group only makes up 37% of Colorado's population, according to federal data. -At least 17 people shot by police in 2024 were fleeing law enforcement in their car or on foot, up from 11 in 2023. Another 10 police shootings stemmed from traffic stops in 2024, more than double the four traffic stop shootings documented in 2023. -The most common calls that escalated into police shootings were disturbances, fights and reports of suspicious people, accounting for roughly a third of incidents in both 2023 and 2024. Of those calls, eight in 2023 and six in 2024 included allegations of domestic violence. -More than a dozen shootings each year - at least 17 in 2023 and 13 in 2024 - stemmed from officers trying to serve an arrest warrant or contact a suspect in a crime. A variety of factors impact police shootings - including specific law enforcement agencies' training of officers and use of force policies, local crime rates, firearm ownership, community diversity and which agencies are responsible for responding to mental health crises - so numbers are unpredictable from year to year. Across the country, the most frequent events that escalate into fatal police shootings involve verbal or physical threats, Ward said. That includes assaults, domestic violence incidents and people "verbalizing threats of harm to themselves or others." Police shootings escalating from well-being checks or other "social needs" were less common across the country, but more likely to be lethal, she said. Ward said the data calls attention to an opportunity for a different response, where people should be able to think of police as a last resort when a "better fit" solution isn't available. She said cities should invest in more targeted responses to these social needs to "reduce exposure to the potential harms from policing." Which departments had the most incidents? Eight Colorado law enforcement agencies saw significant increases in police shootings between 2023 and 2024, ranging from 50% to 250%. In total, 12 agencies that had zero incidents in 2023 documented at least one police shooting in 2024, according to The Post's data. On the other hand, 20 departments that had at least one police shooting in 2023 reported no incidents last year. Thornton police officers shot seven people in 2024, killing six of them. That's the highest of any Colorado law enforcement agency last year and a 250% increase from the two people shot in Thornton police in 2023. One Thornton officer was shot when a 27-year-old man resisted arrest and grabbed the officer's gun after reportedly assaulting someone at a nearby gas station. Another two officers were injured in an hours-long standoff and shootout that rattled Thornton's Orchard Farms subdivision and ended with the suspect dead. In each of Thornton's six fatal police shootings, the suspects were armed and had fired their weapons, though not necessarily at people, Division Cmdr. Tom Connor said. "That is completely out of the norm for us, not somebody being armed in an officer-involved shooting, but having six in one year where that was the case. That's absolutely an anomaly," Connor said. Under Colorado law, when possible, officers are required to give suspects a chance to comply and use nonlethal force if available, Connor said. Thornton officers did not attempt to use nonlethal force in any of the six fatal shootings, but Connor said the suspects escalated the situation. Connor said it can also be more dangerous for officers to use nonlethal force when people are armed because it doesn't immediately incapacitate them. He said it allows the armed suspect to continue to assault officers or others in the area. In the end, it comes down to a split-second decision, and officers must act to protect themselves or others in danger, Connor said. Thornton was followed closely in 2024 police shootings by Colorado Springs, where four people were killed and two were wounded; Aurora, where four people were killed and one was wounded; and Denver, where two people were killed and two were wounded. Pueblo and Lakewood police shot another three people in each city. Thornton's per-capita rate of 4.8 shootings per 100,000 residents in 2024 quadrupled Aurora's rate of 1.1 and was more than eight times Denver's rate of 0.55. "In Aurora, according to the 2023 Use of Force Report, arrests and use-of-force incidents have risen every year since 2021, even as calls for service have steadily declined," Cat Moring from the Denver Justice Project said in an emailed statement to The Post. "This trend reflects internal policy decisions and a department culture that continues to prioritize force over community trust." The Aurora Police Department was placed under a consent decree by state officials in 2021 after a Colorado Attorney General's Office investigation into Elijah McClain's killing found a pattern of racially biased policing and excessive force. "Despite these reforms, the department has failed to rebuild trust, as evidenced by the decline in calls for police service," Moring said. "People are calling the police less because they fear dangerous encounters." Leaving victims' families in the lurch "Language is extremely important," Shofner, the Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership CEO, said. "Oftentimes, when this story is told and the narrative is put out, we'll say that the Black community doesn't trust the police. I don't think that's saying it the right way. It's that the police have lost the trust of the Black community." Jones said the lack of trust also stems from the lack of information and communication from law enforcement agencies. She said the shortage of answers was one of the most difficult things to deal with after her son's shooting. As soon as Jones could after finding out about the shooting, she was on a plane from her home in Georgia to Colorado. Aurora officials called her while she was at the airport, but they could only direct her to the hospital and didn't know Lewis' status. "It was really frustrating because I had a lot of questions that were unanswered," Jones said. "Questions like, 'Who was the officer who killed my son?' and 'What's going to be done about this?' So a lot of anger was building up as I couldn't get my questions answered." Connor said investigators from Colorado's various Critical Incident Response Teams don't release information to the involved departments during the investigations into police shootings. At least for Thornton, whatever the department releases publicly after the shooting - including body camera footage - is all officials outside of the investigation know, he said. "Any officer-involved shooting can affect public trust," Connor said. "There's the potential that it looks like (law enforcement) is hiding information from the public when, in reality, the majority of the time we're not entitled to the information." But Jones said her struggle with the Aurora Police Department continued even after the investigation was closed and no charges were filed against SWAT officer Michael Dieck, who shot and killed her son. She said she was still continuously dismissed by the police department. What happened to the officers who shot people? Despite recent reforms, such as ending qualified immunity in state court, requiring body-worn cameras and mandating decertification for officers who engage in misconduct, the threshold for what counts as "misconduct" remains extraordinarily high, Moring said. Moring said officers are rarely held accountable, and the families of police shooting victims are often left to pursue justice on their own. "Families are still forced to choose between fighting for criminal charges or seeking civil remedies - rarely with the resources, support or capacity to do both," she said. All but one of the 43 police shootings in 2023 for which The Post was able to obtain decision letters were ruled justified. La Salle police Officer Erik Hernandez took a deal and pleaded guilty in January to manslaughter after shooting and killing 38-year-old Juston Reffel in his car outside of a dollar store on May 3, 2023. No charges have been filed in any of the 2024 police shootings for which The Post has obtained copies of district attorneys' decision letters. Jones said she was not surprised when Arapahoe County District Attorney John Kellner decided not to file charges against Dieck, who shot and killed her son. Kellner said Dieck "reasonably believed there was an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury," which justified the officer's use of force under Colorado law, according to Kellner's decision letter to the police department. "There's no healing," Jones said. "Until we get justice, it won't even begin." _____ Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
New York Times
16-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Black Lives Matter Plaza Is Gone. Its Erasure Feels Symbolic.
This week, government workers near the White House, on two blocks lined with luxury hotels and union headquarters, used a jackhammer and a pickax to tear up a mural that read 'Black Lives Matter,' painted on the road during the long hot summer of 2020. The symbolism was potent. The erasure of the bold yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza, installed on 16th Street after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, was a concession from Washington's mayor, Muriel Bowser, who faced threats from congressional Republicans to cut off federal funds to the capital city if the words were not removed. But to Black Americans grappling with a fierce resurgence of forces that they believe are beating back the causes of social justice and civil rights, it felt like much more. That plaza was 'spiritual,' said Selwyn Jones, an uncle of Mr. Floyd. 'But them taking the time to destroy it, that's making a statement, man. That's making a statement, like we don't care.' Even those who did not put much faith in the mural to begin with were taken aback. 'Bowser caving immediately to the faintest hint of pressure on the name of the plaza is somehow even more cynical than the move to name it Black Lives Matter Plaza in the first place,' said Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Black associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown. A movement that once crested with a former Republican senator, Mitt Romney, marching in the streets has now waned. After a brief window of conversation about the ways racism had impeded the progress of Black citizens, the country in November chose to return President Trump to the White House, after he called the words 'Black Lives Matter' a 'symbol of hate' and Black-centered history 'toxic propaganda' at the end of his first term. 'We saw the largest protest movement in our nation's history, a unique and powerful moment where it seemed anything was possible, and you had the numbers to do anything,' lamented Samuel Sinyangwe, executive director of the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence, without exaggeration. The millions of dollars that flowed to groups with 'Black Lives Matter' in their titles have slowed to a trickle, forcing some to retrench, others to close shop. The Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc., for instance, raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. As it recedes, Mr. Trump has sought to bury it. In two short months, his administration has moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion as goals of the federal government and pressured private industry to do the same. It shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked the misconduct records of federal law enforcement officers. Words with even a hint of racial, ethnic or gender sensitivities are being struck from federal websites and documents. Just this week, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to eliminate offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, often with predominantly minority residents. The billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk has even said pardoning George Floyd's killer was 'something to think about.' Beyond Washington, journalists and academics who vaulted to stardom a half decade ago on their reinterpretations of history, their views on racism and their valorizing of the African American experience find themselves sometimes marginalized, and often under attack. 'I feel we are going backwards,' Mr. Jones said. Given the swift change of circumstances, some in the Black Lives Matter movement say they must answer an existential question: How do they pursue racial justice amid so fierce a backlash? Veterans of the movement say they must broaden the activist coalition to be more multiracial, working class, economic and inclusive in its messaging. Although Mr. Trump made gains among voters of color in November, even bragging that he had support of some in the Black Lives Matter movement, they insist his base of support still stems from bigotry. 'Folks got sold a bag of goods under this idea of racism and xenophobia,' said Addys Castillo, a social justice organizer and law student in Connecticut. But, she said, the administration's policies will hurt all those who aren't wealthy, 'so if there was ever a time to have a multiracial, cross cultural movement, this would be the time.' James Forman Jr., a former public defender, an author and a fierce critic of the criminal justice system and its effects on people of color, said persuading all Americans that a system that has harmed Black Americans has harmed them too is difficult — but crucial. 'It's always been hard to be able to get people to see two things at the same time: the ways in which these institutions disproportionately harm Black people, and the way that these institutions harm all people,' he said. Ms. Bowser, who is Black, told laid-off federal workers earlier this month that the mural was a significant part of the city's history, but circumstances have changed. 'Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survive,' she said. Observers say the racial justice movement that crescendoed after Mr. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 had some successes, at least in raising public awareness about structural racism and police violence. Protesters and Black activists pressed people to evolve from support for civil rights as 'mere etiquette' to 'an understanding that actual institutions, political institutions, criminal justice institutions had to be challenged to work differently,' Mr. Táíwò said. But the movement must mature, said Representative Wesley Bell, a Missouri Democrat who rose to prominence after the police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. Mr. Bell, who is Black, defeated one of the most demonstrative Black progressives in the House, Cori Bush, in a heated primary last year, promising voters to bring Greater St. Louis a more sober, effective leadership. 'Some folks think it's just about getting out and protesting,' said Mr. Bell, who advocates moving the social justice cause from the streets to the corridors of power. 'The best protesters do not make the best politicians, and the best politicians don't make the best protesters.' Black Lives Matter began as an online hashtag after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. But the phrase coalesced into a movement after the killing of Michael Brown the following year. From the beginning the phrase drew attacks. 'When you say 'Black lives matter,' that's inherently racist,' the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in 2016. 'Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter.' Four years later, as he campaigned unsuccessfully for re-election, Mr. Trump accused supporters of Black Lives Matter of 'spreading violence in our cities' and 'hurting the Black community.' But in the summer of 2020, millions of Americans took to the streets from all walks of life. Conservative voices, like the president of the Heritage Foundation and Mr. Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, lamented Mr. Floyd's murder. Some of the protests turned violent. A Minneapolis police station was burned to the ground. The calls for incremental police reform became drowned by the rallying cry, 'defund the police.' And that gave Mr. Trump his most potent line of attack against the movement. He reframed a cause that hoped to protect Black lives as a lawless assault on police officers. In his telling, the leaders of the movement were avatars for every left-wing cause in his sights. Because of the Black Lives Matter movement's decentralized structure, many groups were lumped together and faced intense scrutiny, often with negative consequences for the movement as a whole. 'Any strategic or tactical misstep for the movement is going to produce more severe and swift negative consequences,' Mr. Forman said. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, for instance, faced criticism that it misused funds, including the purchase of a $6 million California home. 'I'm not particularly happy with the organization Black Lives Matter, because of their shenanigans,' said Mr. Jones. 'Black Lives Matter, they are not a perfect organization,' said Angela Harrison, an aunt of Mr. Floyd. 'They probably made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But their intention was for the good.' But mistakes added up. The movement to examine historical ways racism has shaped current disparities in areas such as housing and wealth creation gave way to the opposite. Conservative activists successfully pushed state governments to ban teachings that they said made people feel inherently responsible for actions committed in the past. Corporations that once made a show of racial, ethnic and gender sensitivities have begun rolling back their diversity initiatives, seemingly more afraid of the conservative activists fighting them than the social justice activists who had supported them, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. That, he said, 'could certainly suggest that maybe the belief isn't strongly held, but also more of a sense of resignation.' Mr. Sinyangwe is taking a long view and sees parallels and patterns with many historical movements for social justice. 'This movement has followed the trajectory that freedom struggles in the United States have always tended to follow,' he said. A marginalized community pushes back against injustice. Some of its demands are met, but others don't materialize. So they push for more transformative changes only to be met with backlash. 'And that's sort of how America does business,' he said. 'That's not the fault of anyone's slogan.' In June 2020, after Mr. Trump marshaled federal law enforcement and the military to violently confront protesters outside the White House, Ms. Bowser announced that she was renaming a street just off the protest site 'Black Lives Matter Plaza,' complete with 48-foot letters on the pavement. The mayor's decision to remove the letters with Mr. Trump's return to power has been met with ambivalence. Some agree that Ms. Bowser has more pressing concerns, such as budget cuts and the slashing of the federal work force in her city. 'The painting ain't saving any of us,' said Ms. Castillo. Others are gearing up for a fight that will outlive any one presidency. 'I don't believe we'll ever be in a place where there won't be a fight,' Mr. Bell said. 'But I will say this — I don't think that President Trump can stop progress either.'
