The shooting death of a 16-year-old girl by police is among a spate that's upset Anchorage residents

girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 149 points – The shooting death of a 16-year-old girl by police is among a spate that's upset Anchorage residents
apnews.com

Easter Leafa was sitting under a blanket on her balcony with a knife when Anchorage police arrived, responding to a call for help from her family. Instead of showing her hands as told, they said, the 16-year-old girl stood and approached them with the blade.

Two officers opened fire simultaneously, one with a less-lethal foam projectile and the other with real bullets, killing her two days before Leafa was to start her junior year of high school. She had recently moved from American Samoa to get a better education and was still learning English, her family said.

Leafa was among seven people shot by Anchorage police since May, the most recent a homicide suspect critically injured after officers said he opened fire on them Friday afternoon. That is more than twice as many as the department typically shoots in a year. Four of the subjects were killed.

The spate has made Anchorage the latest in a long list of American cities to wrestle with how police use force and prompted an apology to Leafa’s family along with promises of reform from the city’s new mayor.

“This cannot be our new normal,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance told a news conference after Leafa’s death.

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Curious how differently it'd go over if it were a white 16 year old girl.

That's not the slam dunk you think it is, as she was samoan. So she would probably anywhere between 2 and 3 times the size of the average white/Hispanic/black girls her age.

What I find more curious is that two officer shot, but one was using less than lethal rounds. I don't understand why they wouldn't either both have them, or why those wouldn't be used first sans the real bullets.

“2 to 3 times the size” is such a delusional comment.

What....? Seriously? Considering I grew up with a lot of samoans, I think it's you who's mistaken.

And making assumptions about a person's physical appearance isn't the slam dunk you think it is.

Yeah, pretty unfair to assume a member of the largest group of people on Earth is... large.

It's not assumptions, there's photos online...

Also, that's something that only someone who's never been in a Samoan community would ever say.

The only photos I've seen online are head shots and it's pretty hard to tell someone's physical appearance from those.

Also, that's something that only someone who's never been in a Samoan community would ever say.

And again with the assumptions.

No, it's not an assumption. Because if you had, you would know that what I said was completely accurate.

Then I assume you have a crystal ball somewhere. Otherwise you would ask instead of tell me where I have or have not been, and ask instead of tell me who I know or do not know.

No, I don't. There aren't a lot of high density Samoan enclaves around the US relative to other minority groups, and I grew up alongside one of the largest.

I realize it controversial for Lemmy's white liberal sensibilities to point out different groups of people can have different characteristics, but that doesn't make it any less true, no matter how many people down vote what I'm saying.

I also never said any of this justified the police killing her.

You suggested it was understandable for them to shoot her because she was 300% as big as any other race because she's Samoan. I'm flabbergasted at how tone deaf you are.

No, I definitely did not.

I said it wasn't an accurate comparison.

Yes, you did. It seems you didn't mean to, but you did. There's a reason you're catching so much hate right now, and instead of shutting up and introspecting, you're doubling down on your weird obsession that Samoans are 300% bigger than any other person.

You're missing the vital forest you started on by getting stuck defining trees it looks like, but I get it.

Minorities are treated by a separate physical rubric by law enforcement and even the court of public opinion. The biases abound, yes. And those absolutely involve secondary physical characteristics, of which biologically speaking are...things that exist. Like skin color is one.

I get what you're saying and while I don't know why other folks are uncomfortable with that, but if I clocked things right, your original point (paraphrased below) is damn right imo:

Whether a 16 year old child is American Samoan, Black, Hispanic, or White, they are still a child, however large or mature the specific kid's genetics may have rolled them to appear. Further, it is fucked up for cops to default to feeling more threatened by the bigger/more developed ones, to have more bombastic reactions, as does tend to happen.

This is reality for minorities; my large colored ass doesn't get away with certain behaviors even as the affronted party, unfairly as it is.

No, I understand that. She was also a non-native English speaker, who was still learning English.

The first part of my original comment was specifically addressing someone else's comment who was incorrectly comparing apples to cantaloupes.

I said nothing to do about what the cops felt, or even their actions, which I addressed in the second half, but no one has responded to that so it was dropped.

I was simply stating that those are not apt comparisons because of the statistically significant physical differences between those two groups of people.

There's a reason why Pacific islanders, specifically Samoans, are 40 times more likely to be in the NFL than any other group.

None of that justifies the police killing her, but it also invalidates the original comparison, which was all I was critiquing.

Why are cops so fucking scared all the time? Are they trained to be that way?

On bodycam vids on YT, they are absolutely afraid when they have to clear a car or home. They bring in a shield (if they can) and worry about every corner.

The police department has tried to increase its diversity over the past decade...

A black pig just plead guilty to beating Tyre Nichols to death. Diversity in the force is not the solution to police brutality. It's the system, not the actors...ACAB.

The police department has tried to increase its diversity over the past decade, but still 7 in 10 officers are white, far more than the city’s population of 291,000, which is a little over half white, according to Census data.

I'm not a math or statistics person. On its face, I would think "7 in 10" would be close to "a little over half," which would be 6 in 10 (to me). Can someone please ELI5 how this is "far more"?

Police initially said officers shot Handy, who was severely intoxicated, when he raised a long gun toward them in an apartment complex parking lot. But the shooting was the first since Anchorage police began wearing body cameras, and video taken by those cameras and by a neighbor’s security camera appeared to show Handy kept the gun down before police started shooting.

This is the primary issue, I think. If they only just got bodycams, they haven't adjusted their behavior. I watch bodycam vids from YT because they're like reality TV but real and not scripted. People often say they're recording and the cops say, "I'm recording too," very comfortable with the cams. I remember how much the cams were hated by cops a decade ago and now they seem fully-adopted. I think this dept hasn't learned to live with them yet. The amount of abuse that still occurs with the cams makes me shudder to think about how police behaved before they were common.