Ohio police fatally shoot Black teenage girl just before Chauvin verdict
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The fatal shooting of a Black teenager by Columbus police on Tuesday stoked grief and anger just as the murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was being celebrated as a sign of long-elusive accountability for law enforcement.
Police said at a late news conference on Tuesday that the girl had threatened two others with a knife before the shooting, playing segments of body camera video that showed the victim lunging toward someone in a driveway before an officer fired four shots. A knife is visible in the driveway next to the girl as police perform CPR on her.
“We know, based on this footage, the officer took action to protect another young girl in our community,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) said at the news conference. “But a family is grieving tonight, and this young 15-year-old girl will never be coming home.”
It's possible that the action taken by that officer was the right thing to do, but they shot that girl four times. How do I just sit with that, knowing what we know about the kind of knee-jerk reaction a lot of these cops have developed?
It's possible that the cops couldn't have done anything to de-escalate - that there just wasn't time for OODA - that they had no alternative - but they shot that kid four times.
Four times.
On the day we saw a glimmer of hope for the advancement of justice because of the Chauvin verdict - they shot that girl four times.
And I have to sit here and further contemplate having a lot of work to do re-evaluating my own tendency to sympathize with law enforcement, even while acknowledging the obvious problem that too many cops are too eager to go for their guns, probably because that's what they've been conditioned to do - just as I've been conditioned to defer to their discretion.
Reconciling all this cognitive dissonance shit is a real bitch.
Four fucking times.
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