Video footage showing the killing of a black teenager by a police officer was publicly released on Tuesday, on the same day a white Chicago police officer was charged with murder in the shooting death.
The video, which lasts six minutes and 54 seconds, captures the final moments of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s life on October 20, 2014 as he is confronted by two armed police officers in the middle of a Chicago street. The teenager is seen striding down the center of a two-way street and appears to be carrying a knife when the dashboard camera of a police patrol vehicle captures the moment two officers point handguns at him.
He turns briefly toward one of the officers and is then shot, the impact of the first bullet apparently spinning him around before he collapses on the street. A puff of smoke or dust can be seen rising from his body apparently as a bullet hits the ground. The camera continues to focus on his prone body as the officers, now out of frame, shoot him multiple times. An autopsy report from the Cook County medical examiner’s office showed that McDonald was shot 16 times.
Documents filed in court describing the video’s contents say for 14 to 15 seconds, the officer, Jason Van Dyke, unloads his entire gun into the teen, who is laying face down on the ground with his arms and legs jerking from the impact of the shots. Of the eight or more officers on the scene, Van Dyke is the only one to have discharged his weapon, although a colleague can be seen with his gun drawn and pointed at McDonald.
The video ends shortly after a final puff of smoke rises from the ground and one of the officers moves forward and appears to kick an object from McDonald’s right hand.
The footage was released after a day of drama in Chicago that saw Van Dyke indicted on a first-degree murder charge. He was denied bail at a hearing in the city’s main criminal courthouse hours after the state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, announced the charges against him.
Hours later, city officials at a hastily arranged press conference condemned the actions of the officer, but warned protesters to remain calm.
“People have a right to be angry,” said police superintendent Garry McCarthy. “People have a right to protest. People have a right to free speech, but they do not have a right to commit criminal acts.”
City officials and community leaders have been bracing for the release of the video showing the 2014 shooting, fearing an outbreak of unrest and demonstrations similar to what occurred in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities after black men were killed by police. A judge had ordered last week that the footage must be released by November 25.
“Anyone who is there to uphold the law cannot act like they’re above the law,” said Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel at a press conference ahead of the video’s release. “I want to say one thing: there are men and women both in leadership positions and in rank and file who follow and live by that principal every day. Jason Van Dyke does not represent the police department.”
Brandon Smith, the journalist who won a Freedom of Information lawsuit leading to the video’s release, was barred from entering the press conference, as were several other journalists who did not have Chicago police credentials. Smith and his lawyer told the Guardian that they were not notified of the video’s planned release on Tuesday until seeing it on social media. While standing outside of the police headquarters, Smith’s lawyer Matt Topic was notified by officials via phone that a copy was en route to his office.
The announcement of the murder charge and slow release of details of the video before the actual dash-cam footage appeared timed to lessen the chances for violent reactions. McDonald’s family has called for calm.
“With release of this video,” Alvarez said on Tuesday at a press conference before the video’s release, “it’s really important for public safety that the citizens of Chicago know that this officer is being held responsible for his actions.”
She added that the officer’s actions “were not justified or the proper use of deadly force by an officer.”
“I have absolutely no doubt that this video will tear at the hearts of Chicagoans,” she said.
Since the death of McDonald, the Chicago police union and the lawyer representing the officer have maintained that Van Dyke felt the teenager presented a serious danger to Van Dyke and other officers.
“I can’t speak to why the [other] officers didn’t shoot,” Daniel Herbet, the lawyer representing Van Dyke, told reporters Friday, according to the Chicago Tribune. “But I certainly can speak to why my client shot, and it is he believed in his heart of hearts that he was in fear for his life, that he was concerned about the lives of [other] police officers.”
Last Thursday, a judge had ordered the dash-cam recording to be released by November 25 after city officials had argued for months that it could not be made public until the conclusion of several investigations.
The video had not been seen by anyone outside of the investigation or city officials until Tuesday, not even by McDonald’s mother, who had publicly argued against the release of the video, saying she feared violent protests.
On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel called together a number of community leaders to appeal for help calming the emotions that have built up over the McDonald shooting. Some attendees of the meeting said afterward that city officials waited too long after McDonald was shot to get them involved.
“You had this tape for a year and you are only talking to us now because you need our help keeping things calm,” one of the ministers, Corey Brooks, said after the meeting.
Ira Acree, who described the meeting with Emanuel as “very tense, very contentious,” said the mayor expressed concerns about the prospect of any demonstrations getting out of control. Another minister who attended, Jedidiah Brown, said emotions were running so high that there would be no stopping major protests once the video was released.
In April 2015, the FBI announced a joint investigation with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the city’s Independent Police Review Authority into the shooting. Two days later, the city council approved a $5m settlement for McDonald’s family, though they had not filed a lawsuit. Chicago’s corporation counsel, Stephen Patton, said the dashboard-camera footage had prompted the city’s decision to settle.
Van Dyke is the first on-duty officer to be charged with murder while working for the Chicago police department in nearly 35 years. Since the incident, Van Dyke has been on paid desk leave while both federal and state investigations into the incident took place.
According to a freedom of information request by the Chicago Tribune, the veteran officer has had at least 15 complaints filed against him while working in high-crime neighborhoods, for accusations including using racial epithets and pointing a gun at an arrestee without justification.
In 2007, the officer was involved in a traffic stop in which he and his partner were found to have used excessive force on a man with no prior convictions, leading to a $350,000 award for damages in the case, the Tribune reported.
Chicago police also moved late on Monday to discipline a second officer who had shot and killed an unarmed black woman in 2012, in another incident causing tensions between the department and minority communities. Superintendent Garry McCarthy recommended firing officer Dante Servin for the shooting of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, saying Servin showed “incredibly poor judgment” even though a jury had acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter and other charges last April.
The fears of unrest stem from longstanding tensions between the Chicago police and minority communities, partly due to the department’s reputation for brutality, particularly involving black residents. Dozens of men, mostly African American, said they were subjected to torture at the hands of a Chicago police squad headed by former commander Jon Burge from the 1970s to the early '90s, and many spent years in prison. Burge was eventually convicted of lying about the torture and served four years in prison.
The two ministers said black people in the city were upset because the officer, though stripped of his police powers, has been assigned to desk duty and not fired.
“They had the opportunity to be a good example and a model across the country on how to improve police and community relations and they missed it,” Acree said.
The Chicago police department said placing an officer on desk duty after a shooting is standard procedure and that it is prohibited from doing anything more during the investigations.
An Illinois judge has released a long-concealed picture that shows two Chicago police officers posing over an unidentified black man in antlers while holding rifles as if he had been hunted.
The photo, which was given to police by federal prosecutors in 2013, was made public for the first time on Wednesday by Cook county Judge Thomas Allen. It was taken sometime between 1998 and 2003 at the Harrison police district station on the west side.
This station is a mile south of Homan Square, the facility where the Guardian earlier this year identified alleged police misconduct and torture as well as other civil rights violations.
Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy – who last week at a police board meeting deferred any questions about Homan Square brought up by citizens to police legal counsel – called the photo “disgusting”.“As the superintendent of this department and as a resident of our city, I will not tolerate this kind of behavior, and that is why neither of these officers works for CPD today.”
Jerome Finnigan, on the left, was fired long before the photo was given to the city. He was sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison for income tax evasion and robbery. But the photo is the direct cause of Timothy McDermott’s firing in 2014 by the police board in a 5-to-4 vote.
While board dissenters thought McDermott should be suspended, the majority wrote that “appearing to treat an African-American man not as a human being but as a hunted animal is disgraceful and shocks the conscience”.
McDermott, who asked the judge to keep the photo under seal, is appealing against his dismissal in court, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
In May Chicago became the first city in the nation to pass a reparations ordinancegiving financial restitution, access to city colleges and a memorial, among other things, to victims of police torture under Chicago police commander Jon Burge. The package passed almost a week after it came to light that the city had paid out more than half of a billion dollars for police misconduct in the past decade.
On the day it won unanimously in a city council vote, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said its passage would “bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s history to a close”.
For the black men who lived through torture orchestrated by Chicago police commander Jon Burge, and for the lawyer and journalist who pursued him, the city’s establishment of a reparations fund has transformed an impossible dream into a model for a country currently reckoning with racialized police brutality.
“This is something that sets a precedent that has never been done in the history of America,” said Darrell Cannon. “Reparations given to black men tortured by some white detectives. It’s historic.”
Cannon survived an act of badge-protected savagery. In 1983, officers who suspected him of murder and who answered to Burge took an electric cattle prod to Cannon’s testicles. They opened his mouth and pushed in the barrel of a shotgun, pulling the trigger three times on a weapon Cannon did not know was empty.
Like torture inflicted by security forces throughout history, what happened to Cannon was not a random act of sadism. It had a specific result: getting Cannon to confess to a murder he did not commit. Only after 24 years of incarceration, including a stint on death row, did Illinois release him.
“If you stay the course,” Cannon, now 64 years old, told the Guardian hours after the Chicago city council voted on Wednesday to establish a $5.5m reparations fund for Burge’s victims , “you can affect the change.”
The funds will be used to pay up to $100,000 per individual for living survivors with valid claims to have been tortured in police custody during Burge’s command
Gregory Banks was 20 years old when Burge associates John Byrne and Peter Dignan came for him. Handcuffed to a bolt in the wall of Burge’s Area 2 headquarters in 1983, Banks had Byrne’s gun stuffed in his mouth after he denied, truthfully, committing a different murder. He was hit with a flashlight, kicked and had a bag stuffed over his head to suffocate him.
Banks served seven years in prison before his own exoneration. On Wednesday, he told the Guardian: “This is just the beginning. There’s a lot more work we have to do, a lot more individuals locked up that must be free” – victims of police abuse, coerced confessions, illicit surveillance, prosecutorial misconduct and other excesses institutionalized in what activists call America’s “carceral state”.
“Nobody believes them, but we believe them,” Banks said, “because we know it happens, because it happened to us.”
Flint Taylor believed them. With his colleagues, Taylor, a longtime civil-rights attorney in Chicago, spent three decades pursuing Burge and seeking justice for the police commander’s crimes.
Like Cannon and Banks, Taylor was less interested in reflecting on a milestone achievement than he was in looking forward to the implications the reparations fund has for addressing the racialized police crisis that a new generation of activists nationwide has brought out of the shadows.
“Hopefully it’ll be a beacon for other cities here and across the world for dealing with racist police brutality so prevalent in the past in this country and, we’re unfortunately seeing, continues to this day,” Taylor said.
John Conroy also believed men like Cannon and Banks. As a reporter for the alternative Chicago Reader, Conroy dug into the shocking stories of people like Andrew Wilson , a cop killer whom Burge’s police tortured. While he and his editors thought they would soon get scooped by the larger local media, other journalists showed little interest.
Conroy said he thought “the dailies were going to pick this up and we couldn’t compete. They didn’t. A couple years later there were police board hearings about other torture and it was covered like a fire: [for just] one day. There was sort of daily coverage, but no one said: ‘If he tortured Andrew Wilson and maybe it looks like other people, [then] what about those other people?’”
Now out of journalism and working as director of investigations for DePaul University’s legal clinic, Conroy considers Burge “not a monster, as people make him out to be”, but instead the product of a comprehensive institutional failure.
“This would not have happened if he had been properly supervised; it would not have happened if the courts stepped in; if prosecutors had not turned a blind eye; if courts had not ignored patterns they’d seen. The media shares some blame, as does the clergy, the bar associations – look wherever you want,” Conroy said.
“The ordinance is part of a very long history here in Chicago,” Jason Tompkins, a lead coordinator of Black Lives Matter Chicago, told the Guardian.
Tompkins says it is important that people be reminded that the survivors of Burge torture were mostly young black men like Banks at the time. And with almost all living survivors now well into their 60s, he sees this passage as a testament to their own persistence.
Over the past few months, Tompkins’ group has been helping organize rallies for both this fund and more recent allegations of police misconduct at the Chicago police facility known as Homan Square.
“With this ordinance, we are talking about very specific survivors under Burge, but we know full well that a lot of things that would fit the international definitions of torture have happened in this city after Burge.”
The establishment of the fund comes at a time where the nation is seeing national organizing around police violence led by groups such as Black Lives Matters. Those in Chicago who have helped organize for this package see the national context as a vital part to its success.
“I think the national context has perhaps given Chicago elected officials the courage to be different,” Martha Biondi, chair of the African-American Studies department at Northwestern and a member of the negotiating committee for the ordinance said on Wednesday.
A scholar of social movements, she said she hopes the fund will be seen as a model for justice by others across the country and a way to “imagine a different future” in regards to justice for victims of police violence.
Mariame Kaba is the executive director of Project NIA and has been actively raising awareness of the ordinance. She found Wednesday to be a testament to “years of organizing and protests and investigative journalism” that helped bring to light survivors’ stories that led to justice.
While she said she could talk about the struggle and all the work that still needs to be done in the city, she instead took the day to “savor that sometimes we do win …We sometimes do.”
Cannon said he considers the fund “a beautiful start”, and hopes the long, persistent, patient struggle of torture survivors and activists will resonate around the country – particularly after the riots in Baltimore from people fed up after the death of Freddie Gray .
“Here in Chicago we didn’t burn anything down, we didn’t destroy any of our buildings and property. I’m not downgrading anybody else who chose whatever route they chose; it’s what they felt they needed to do, in Baltimore, et cetera. But here in Chicago we tried to do it the right way by being within the law. It’s a prime example of what we can do,” Cannon said.
Cannon continued: “Nothing is easy, especially of this nature, getting people to change their way of thinking how they view people. I’m hoping this will be a catalyst this coming summer, so they’ll say: ‘Chicago did not burn, they pushed for reparations, they went on a campaign to do it the proper way, without violence.’ I hope it’ll be a springboard for other cities this coming summer.”
Life is often referred to as a highway, to borrow from Tom Cochrane, and for my generation that hasn’t changed.
“Adulthood today lacks a well-defined roadmap,” writes Steven Mintz, in his forthcoming book, The Prime of Life. “Today, individuals must define or negotiate their roles and relationships without clear rules or precedents to follow.”
This is especially true for us millennials, who are the product of a terrible economy that has required us to hit the emergency button in our lives. But it’s becoming evident that we have been given a roadmap to a road we are not even on and then we're blamed for going in the wrong direction.
I recently turned 25 and I am failing at being an adult. I don’t see myself buying a house anytime soon or investing in property. I don’t want to have kids anytime soon because I honestly don’t know how I afford to feed myself half the time, let alone a child. And the only person I want to marry is the barista at the cafe by my house, but I haven’t even told him my name.
Traditionally, by 25 we are expected to have accomplished, or at leastgotten close to accomplishing, five pillars of “adulthood”: having children, graduating from college, getting married, finding a career and buying a home. It’s no wonder that, since turning 25, I find myself having daily anxieties about not being the kind of adult my parents or grandparents were.
The Great Recession made us boomerang back home or stay in school to remain afloat during the storm. While this situation seemed to make us too reliant on parents or other support systems, it isn’t like millennials weren’t trying. I mean, honestly, who wouldn’t want to be completely independent? We aren’t complete failures, we’re just delayed and it’s really not our fault.
On the surface, this new adulthood may seem selfish and narcissistic. While I agree that my generation may be a tad self-obsessed, primarily due to the advent of social media, this new adulthood will potentially create a better world.
According to the Pew Research Center series “Millennials: A portrait of generation next," we are a group that is confident, connected and open to change even in the face of adversity. But we are delayed in maturing.
The same study found that we are more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal and, even though 37% of us are unemployed, nine in 10 report having enough money to eventually meet our financial goals.
The author of the report, Jeffrey Arnett wrote a book about “emerging adults,” a demographic 18 to 29 years old, that is experiencing an extended adolescence. This extra time allows young people to “develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.”
While this new stage of development may have pushed us back, that’s not actually a terrible thing, he suggests. Due to more time to think and explore, we’ve become better people and know what we want and are able to create a better foundation for our futures.
Arnett told the New York Times Magazinein 2013 that emerging adulthood is a time where 20-somethings don’t see themselves as adults and go through: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.”
Due to this new stage of exploration, our deadline for getting our acts together is now around 30 or later, and not earlier, like in prior decades. And with longer life expectancies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are taking our time growing up, since we now have so much more life to live.
So no matter what your thoughts are toward millennials, adulthood is officially delayed with no signs of it reverting back to 1960s standards. It’s just going to take some time for my generation to get where others were years before them.
So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. And as my mom would say while driving, we’ll get there when we get there.
If you are straight and haven’t used condoms with multiple partners: Donate blood! If you had sex with a sex worker of the opposite sex: Donate blood! If you had sex over a year ago with a partner of the opposite sex who is HIV-positive: Donate your blood!
But if you are a man, and you ever had sex with another man? The new rules say you’d better keep your blood to yourself, if you’re in America.
After a meeting of the blood products advisory panel at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the chances of the United States adopting even a new, slightly less homophobic blood donation policy – allowing men who haven’t had sex with other men in the last year – are slim, and the lifelong ban looks like it’s here to stay in all its ugly glory.
There has been a tremendous amount of effort to change blood donation policiesin the US, particularly over the last year, to mirror the more science-based and progressive ones in countries like Japan and Australia – where the policy hasn’t led to any increased risk. And, in its wake, the US department of health and human services’ committee on blood and tissue safety and availability recommended last month that the policies be softened and men be allowed to donate blood after a year of abstinence.
The American Association for Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers and the American Red Cross have urged the FDA to change its policy since 2006, calling the lifetime ban on male blood donors who ever had sex with another man “medically and unscientifically unwarranted”. In 2013 the American Medical Association took the call even further and labeled the ban just plain discrimination.
And, in 2014, all blood that is donated is tested thoroughly, so the chances of getting blood that is HIV-positive is so minuscule that it’s rendered the ban on certain men’s donations archaic and, when compared to who remains allowed to donate, the clear, ongoing discrimination against men who have ever had sex with men is almost funny.
But it’s not – not when someone like Dr Susan Leitman, a member of the FDA panel, can oppose the abstinence waiver policy and say: “It sounds to me like we’re talking about policy and civil rights rather than our primary duty, which is transfusion safety.”
When the ban on male donors who had ever had sex with men originated in the early 1980s, the reason was actually logical: HIV wasn’t very well understood and technology didn’t yet exist to screen blood very widely nor detect small virus loads, and the FDA didn’t want HIV-positive blood to make its way into blood banks and then to the public. But it does now – and we know that is does. The ban is simply discrimination.
While men who have sex with men are at higher-than-average risk for acquiring the virus, that risk comes from actions beyond simply having sex with other men. But when we base a policy on whether a man has, even once, had sex with another man, that is about identity, not risk factors.
To be a man and have sex with another man is not to put yourself automatically at risk for HIV – this is 2014, and we all understand how HIV is transmitted. It is no longer the “gay cancer”. To have sex with another person who has the virus (or whose HIV status is unknown to them or you) without any barrier method of protection is to put yourself at risk – whether you are gay, straight, bi- or even pansexual.
But these are the crumbs that many of us are willing to accept – the crumbs that cement our second-class treatment, even after our big fight for marriage equality. Even by accepting a one-year abstinence waiver in lieu of a life-long ban, we are accepting prejudice against us over science that, in many ways, once freed us from fear. Gay men have for too long gotten crumbs while others get a seat at the table – and a microphone at the FDA to preach their unscientific prejudice. It’s time to pull the plug.
Can you hate part of yourself so much that you want to kill people like you? And is that a hate crime?
Those are the questions being whispered at gay bars, asked behind tears in family living rooms, and maybe even being answered by the police force here – on the other side of Missouri from Ferguson – after the shocking and complicated death of 22-year-old Dionte Greene, who was shot and killed on the morning of Halloween in his still-running car, possibly by a “straight” man who may have agreed to meet him for sex.
In the minds of Greene’s family and friends, there is no doubt that he was murdered because he was gay – probably, they say, by the man he decided to meet. But in the eyes of the law – or at least law enforcement – that man’s alleged sexual interest in Greene means this killing and others like it cannot be considered hate crimes. One human’s self-doubt can be the end of another’s life, and even with hate crimes on the rise across the US, that letter of our lethargic law means we’ll never know about violence we’re already not doing enough to prevent.
“My son ... he was quiet – not a problem child,” Coshelle Greene told me late last month, as a nation began to confront what justice looks like for young black lives lost too soon. “Being that he wasn’t a street person, and didn’t have enemies, I lean towards it having to be someone who was on the down-low or someone so against gay people that they would do this.”
Greene’s mother and many of the other people I interviewed in Kansas City fear that since Greene’s body was discovered in a low-income, high-crime area that is predominantly black, his case will merely be classified as another crime against a black person by a black person – rather than a modern kind of true crime against a gay man who was also black, by a man who may have been afraid of the truth.
And they should be worried, because justice vanishes too often with cases that force police departments and even the most progressive communities to consider victims who lived at the intersection of multiple sexual and gender identities – the complex people who are at a much higher risk of facing hate-motivated violence, or even perpetrating it.
Especially when you’re black. Especially when the cops would rather not check an extra box.
On 30 October, Dionte Greene finished work before midnight to attend a “turn-about” party, where people show up dressed as a different gender. But before the party, Greene had plans with some “trade” he had been talking to online, several of his friends told me. “Trade” is a version of “on the down-low” – terms used within black LGBT communities to describe a man who doesn’t “appear gay” but who engages in sex with men unbeknownst to his family and most of his friends. Trade is a man you don’t necessarily trust – more of a risk than many are willing to take.
According to friends who saw his private messages, Greene had been in correspondence online with this “trade” for some time prior to their meeting, as the man apparently tried to decide whether or not they should meet up. The “trade” was very much on the fence about having sex with men, according to accounts of these messages, and he very much did not want his sexual secret to be found out. But something changed, and the “trade” agreed to meet up that night, Greene’s friends said.
When Greene arrived at the pre-arranged meeting spot in a quiet residential area just miles north of his home, he was on the phone with a friend who could sense that Greene was a little nervous about the meeting. As they spoke, according to other friends with knowledge of this conversation, the man started walking towards Greene’s car. “He looks just like his Facebook picture,” Greene allegedly said.
Moments later, Dionte Greene’s friend heard yelling. The phone line went dead. And Dionte Greene ended up with a gunshot to the face in the driver’s seat of his car.
In a slowly increasing trend for American law enforcement, the Kansas City police department recently appointed its first LGBT liaison, Rebecca Caster, an affable, blond-haired, out-lesbian cop who’s proud to work for a “very progressive” city “that is willing to push the envelope and create change”. There have been no charges or arrests yet in the Greene case – the homicide investigation is very much still active – but Officer Caster still doesn’t necessarily see circumstances like the ones alleged by Greene’s friends: a hate-based sexual killing, spontaneous murder driven by identity politics as much as rage. Several of these friends have been interviewed by the cops, too, but the cops still won’t – can’t – call Greene’s killing a hate crime.
Even the most visibly gay cop in Missouri’s biggest city is not allowed to put this case in the class of crimes that, when acknowledged as they were with Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr in 1998, can actually help address the root causes of the very real violence that people are facing based on their identities, especially when they’re black and gay.
“If someone is actually engaged in ‘the act’, then these are not hate crimes,” Caster told me.
But according to the Kansas City Anti-Violence Project, which organized a meeting on 11 November between Greene’s friends and the police, Greene’s case is one of at least seven murders of LGBT people in Kansas City since 2010 – and three of those strike community leaders as eerily similar crimes of passion.
I pressed Officer Caster about the case of Henry Scott IV, who was stabbed and burned alive four years ago. Birmingham White pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the case in 2011 and was sentenced to 15 years, plus an additional seven on a weapons charge. Multiple people in Kansas City’s LGBT community alleged that White was Scott’s lover but that White never came out as gay and that he killed Scott to keep him from outing him. Officer Caster told me that Scott’s death was also never considered a hate crime – and so one bias-motivated killing got swept under the rug, instead of helping to prevent another.
“It was motivated by his fear of being out,” Caster said of White’s motive for the killing. “The thing is, hate crimes need to be, ‘I can’t stand the fact that you are gay so I am going to drag you behind a truck. I don’t know you, I don’t care.’”
It makes your stomach turn, hearing a cop so matter-of-factly say something like that. It’s enough to make you think that Dionte Green’s case might follow the same path: young black man murdered without the protocol to investigate the terrible, complicated bias potentially behind the whole familiar crime, nothing changes, another black man dies tomorrow.
A spokesperson for the KCPD told me on Monday afternoon that “savvy” detectives were on the case reviewing all evidence and that “some tips were received after the initial news reports”. But by the time that police work plays out, history may have already repeated itself again with the same tragic consequences.
The morning her son was shot and killed was Halloween, and Coshelle Greene had been “fussing at” Dionte through the walls of their ranch-style home, from a room away, about cleaning up around the house. When he didn’t respond, she checked the living room where Dionte had been sleeping since moving back home. But Dionte never came home on Halloween. So she called his phone, which went to voicemail.
And then came a knock on the door. “[I]t was the police and they asked me, ‘Does Dionte Greene live here?’” They didn’t tell her why – they just asked questions about the last time she’d seen her son, what kind of car he drove, if she had any photos of Dionte, like that. Questions about his sexuality never came up; they were never answered because they were never asked.
As the questions continued, Coshelle got flustered and finally refused to answer any more of them until the two officers told her that they had found her “baby”.
The last available hate-crime statistics from the FBI show that 46.9% of these reported crimes in the US were motivated by race and 20.8% were motivated by sexual orientation. They do not account for when race and sexuality overlap. In 2013, more than 2,000 incidents nationwide reported incidents of LGBT violence; of the 18 anti-LGBT incidents classified as homicides, 16 of the victims were people of color and 13 were transgender, and two-thirds were transgender women of color. That’s a lot of overlap – and that’s almost certainly an undercount, because police departments in places a lot worse than Kansas City aren’t all that interested in counting.
Hate crimes are crucially important to our broken criminal justice system. They differentiate from unbiased motivated crimes, and not just by reminding us, officially, that we do not live in some sort of post-racist or post-gay utopia. When the cops investigate and lawyers prosecute something as a hate crime, it teaches us quite the opposite: that we cannot afford to ignore systems like racism and homophobia – that we will not, officially.
Hate crimes and bias-motivated crimes are some of the most underreported to police, right up there with sexual and domestic assault, even though they are so clearly based on the sheer hatred of someone for who they are – even though they should be reported the most. But even when hate crimes are reported, they’re often handled inappropriately, if not downright ignored.
“With biased crimes, it seems like pulling teeth to get them to check that extra box in the paperwork,” says Justin Shaw, executive director of the Kansas City Anti-Violence Project. “We hear so many incidents that happen and get labeled simple assault when there is an obvious hate component – it feels as if we are stuck in a paperwork cycle with people’s lives.”
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"594691","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image media-image-left","height":"500","style":"width: 228px; height: 500px; float: left;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"228"}}]]Shaw suggests that many officers take a laid-back approach to filing cases like Greene’s – that they tend to skip marking any potential bias on police reports, because it is easier for cops to chalk up situations to “unfavorable neighborhoods” like the one in which Greene’s body was found.
If the aftermath of the very public killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson has taught us anything, it’s that cops should never default to their worst instincts when it comes to young black bodies in a “bad” part of town. That just makes it easier to keep chalking up the sidewalks, with the outline of another dead man.
The Kansas City police spokesperson told me Green’s death would be prosecuted as a hate crime if there is “enough evidence”, but even when cops do check the hate-crime box, a case tends to be imagined as an encounter between strangers. “When two people have a relationship and there is a grudge or jealousy or betrayal,” says Jack Levin, professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University, “then the court is reluctant to charge as a hate offense.”
The primary premise of hate-crime law, Levin explained, is determined by a “difference” between the victim and the suspect – by the very lack of a relationship. So when bias-motivated crimes occur between people who share an identity to some extent and know each other, prosecuting them as such becomes that much more difficult.
“Hate crimes are message crimes,” Levin says, “and hate-crime laws send a message back. They send a message to the perpetrator that we do not encourage or support him – that we don’t agree with his intolerance.”
Dionte Greene was 16 when he told his mother he was gay, and she blamed herself – for not allowing his own father or other potential role models to come around. “I wasn’t so much against it,” Coshelle Greene told me, sitting on the couch Dionte used to call a bed. “I just didn’t want it for mine. I just knew how society looks at it, and how it’s so frowned upon.”
Greene’s mother knew what the world thought of gay men – what it still thinks of us – and she knew that her son already had so much stacked against him as a black man trying to stay off the streets. Being gay was just another strike against him.
But Coshelle Greene didn’t turn her back on her son then – and she still won’t, even as police quietly continue their investigation and the case gets barely a few paragraphs on local television station websites. As its investigation continues, Greene continues to call the Kansas City police department several times each week to make sure her “baby” isn’t pushed aside – so that the police accept what Coshelle Greene already believes: Dionte was murdered because he was gay, and his murderer wasn’t sure if he wanted to be.
What breaks Coshelle’s heart even more is that not even Dionte – a quiet, smart, well-dressed kid whose mom made sure he went to school and church – could escape the same plight of so many black men in America who face such exorbitant violence from police and from their communities. The heartbreaking thing is that she has been made into just another mother who lost just another son.
Because there were already too many strikes against him.
“There is a lot of work to be done,” Officer Caster told me over coffee in the mostly white Westport neighborhood of Kansas City, about 10 miles from Greene’s home in the predominantly black southern part of town. “But I am excited about it. I am excited about bridging the gap between the police department and the LGBTQ community, but also ourselves.”
It’s a sentiment you hear more and more as same-sex marriage continues its roll across America. Many within the LGBT community are asking: OK, what can we do for ourselves next? But self-reflection isn’t productive when we don’t know who “ourselves” even are.
To be black and gay and transgender and poor, for example, is to be a more colorful rainbow, for sure. But each of those definitions of self multiplies the systemic violence attached to each of them – every extra sliver of the rainbow widens that gap between safety and danger.
It’s a gap that reveals how a law enforcement system can fail not just black people, but black people who are also gay – simply because cops can’t immediately start investigating hate crimes, even if they have immediate evidence about the sex lives of our Dionte Greenes.
It’s a gap that exposes homophobia as not just something that makes someone drag you behind a truck, but as a sickness that can make someone kiss and then kill – simply because someone didn’t want their secret to get out.
And it’s a gap that tells all of us we need to start checking those boxes. That is the work to be done.
Missie B’s is a gay bar that’s usually full of white people, but two Fridays ago, as the grand jury in Ferguson announced it needed another weekend to announce its decision, a couple dozen black LGBT people milled around watching a drag show.
“It’s been really tough,” said Star Palmer, a 34-year-old black lesbian woman, looking exhausted. “This shouldn’t have happened to him. Not Dionte.”
There are deep divides between the police and the large LGBT community in Kansas City, but also within the gay community itself. “These bars will maybe let us throw an event here or there,” Palmer says of nightlife in the city, “but we always have to be gone by 10 so the white patrons can have the bar back.”
So Palmer and friends throw club nights around town for black LGBT people who want a safe space – who need a place where they are welcomed, rather than having to meet up with strangers on late-night street corners.
Dionte Greene was a member of the House of Cavalli, a kind of second “family” of the type that has emerged especially within black LGBT communities – often to create support systems for people who have been rejected by their biological parents. (Members of the house attended the November joint meeting with police investigating the killing.)
Hooking up with “trade” is a hot topic in houses across the country – but the dangers of the trend often get left to whispers as faint as a police officer who would rather not find out if a homicide victim was gay.
“We need to educate the kids,” Palmer says – that it’s never a victim’s fault, that it’s OK to hook up with someone who’s unsure of his sexuality (“It’s a conquer thing,” she tells me), as long as you take the necessary precautions. Given the deep racial segregations in the LGBT community of this city and so many like it, leaders like Palmer and Korea Kelly, the mother of the House of Cavalli, need to lead in safely navigating a culture that is open about sex but protective about the potential risks of certain practices. Because American cops sure aren’t doing enough to lead.
As a transgender woman, Kelly knows all too well the potential violence people face when you’re LGBT and you’re having sex with someone who doesn’t identify with that community. “You’re playing with fire,” Kelly told me over lunch. “This is someone who is not cool with this, so you’re taking a chance. Yes, it could be death, [or] he could think, ‘Ah, he’ll just bop me’, or it could be more. You never know.”
As little as parents and police choose not to know about the sometimes dangerous subcultures of America’s gay community, trust me: this is not a black thing.
While the subculture of the “down-low” has predominantly been framed within the context of black men, trust me: having sex with men who don’t identify as gay is not a black thing. All sorts of men do it.
I have actively pursued men – black and white, young and old – who don’t necessarily identify as gay or bisexual. If you give it enough time, sometimes they engage on the “down-low”. And there is something about having a man choose you that fulfills the very self-hatred – deep down in many gay men – that homophobia seeks to maintain.
LGBT people grow up in a world that says “no” all the time. No, you’re not worthy. No, your desires are unnatural. And we hear a lot of this from men. So when a man does come to you and he’s willing to explore everything he has said “no” to for so long, many of us say “yes” to that man – even if he’s a murderer.
That totally natural instinct does not make the dangerous fallout from our complicated desires our fault – Dionte Greene is not to blame for his own death – but it does mean we need to account for the danger. It means that crimes of confused passion must be hate crimes, just like cases that involve someone being dragged behind a truck, as in Officer Caster’s banal fantasy of violence, because both have to do with being LGBT. The complex hate crime and its rulebook cousin are both motivated by the insidious ways in which homophobia still exists – that someone would rather kill than be outed or caught getting a blowjob from another guy in the front seat of his car.
That is what a “very progressive” city should do. That’s what “pushing the envelope” means. That’s what justice looks like to Coshelle Greene, a modern mother who rose above stereotypes and circumstances that have pushed so many other parents to turn their backs on people like her son.
Sitting there with Coshelle on the couch where Dionte slept, I thought about my own mother, who never cast me out of her own life, and how we both had mothers who loved us, Dionte and me, and families that took care of us, and how we as black gay men can do everything right – and still end up dead for being gay and black anyway.
My white brother loved black people more than I did when we were growing up. As a black interracial child of the south – one who lived in a homogenous white town – I struggled with my own blackness. I struggled even more with loving that blackness. But my brother, Mitch, didn’t. He loved me unapologetically. He loved me loudly.
He also loved screwing with other people’s expectations. Whenever we met new people or I joined a social situation he was in, Mitch would make sure I was standing right next to him for introductions and say, “This is Zach, my brother” – and then go silent with a smirk.
These new acquaintances would then scan back and forth with such intensity – black, white, white, black – that our faces became a kind of tennis court, with strangers waiting for someone to fault. Eventually someone would awkwardly laugh and say something like: “Oh, adoptedbrother,” immediately looking relieved to have figured it out. My brother would deny that and push the line further, “No, like, my brother. We have the same mom. We are blood.”
That would lead to someone questioning me intensely, and, each time, my white brother would stand next to me, proud: prouder than me of my own skin. And over the years, as he continued playing this game, I became prouder ... with his help.
Hearing about black men dying is never exactly a surprise. Every day, you see the news stories: On the news, black men die while getting Skittles. On the news, black men die in choke-holds. On the news, black men diefor playing their music too loud. It seems black men die on the news more than they do almost anything else on the news, even with a black president in office. Every 28 hours, a black man is killed by a police officer in America.
I just never imagined that the police officer in that scenario would ever be my brother. Mitch was supposed to be different than all the rest. He was supposed to be different because of me.
The first thing I did after I got the phone call was Google my brother’s name. I saw a mix of headlines; some outlets were more sympathetic toward the unarmed 22-year-old victim, while other coverage was more favorable to my brother, the cop who “accidentally” killed someone. Articles kept using that word – “accidental” – over and over, and it felt like aloe on a burn.
Watching the first press conference later that day, the police spokesman talked about how my brother was just doing his job, that he followed protocol and that this was just a tragic accident for everyone involved. After the press conference, one of the local news stations in Nashville aired a more in-depth look at the case and reported that the victim had a family member who had been shot by someone on the same police force years earlier – also, apparently, “by accident”.
Accident seemed like an odd word to me for this situation. When I hear the word “accident”, I usually think about spilled milk or the dog urinating on the carpet or even bumper scratch. Accidents were things that you respond to with, “Whoops, sorry!” But with this accident, I wondered: to whom could we even say “sorry” now that a man lay dead?
While I watched, I kept thinking about why these accidents always seemed to happen to black people. And why they were called accidents, when it seemed so clearly to be much more than an accident – when it seemed to be a flaw in a system that called things accidents.
I stared at my computer after my screen went black and prayed that it wasan accident. Because calling it that didn’t make me feel I had to choose my race over my blood – the strangers who asked me questions over the brother who wanted them to.
I went home to Tennessee a few years later, after the media coverage of the case had calmed down, and sat in one of the chairs in my mother’s living room and let the argument happen. My mother, with her smooth milk skin, stared at me with eyes that would not unlock from my own.
“Do you actually think he shot him because he was black?” she asked, tearing up.
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
“But how can you say that? Honestly, he is blacker than you!”
I winced at her backwards compliment, the racism veiled as praise, the description I’d heard since I could write my name.
“Mom, that is simply not true. He is white. This will never change, no matter what he does. Never. And because I am black, I know that if that man would have been white he would be alive today.”
My mom finally unlocked eyes with me and stared down at her glass. I could see that she wanted to agree with me, but couldn’t this time, because it was an indictment of her other son. She had probably never imagined having to argue with her black son about her white son shooting and killing an unarmed black man while on duty.
But that’s also when I began to see just how much racism isn’t really about a single act or a single person, but rather a much larger system . A system that calls the recurring death of black male bodies “accidents”.
No matter how my mom had raised us, no matter how much my brother loved my blackness and was so proud of me for who I was, it still didn’t stop another black man from losing his life.
My white brother isn’t a racist – and he didn’t intentionally kill that man because he was black – but that’s not the point. In his case – in Ferguson and in so many other cases – we see the deaths of unarmed black men as “accidents”. And until the day we all recognize them as casualties of something much bigger, we will continue to see black men dead on the news.
We will continue to see brothers killing brothers.
