July 5: A police officer shot and killed 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man, in Baton Rouge, La. Involved officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II have been placed on paid administrative leave while the Justice Department investigates the shooting, the Advocate reported.
July 6: Police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile, also a black man, in Falcon Heights, Minn. The Washington Post reported that Yanez and his backup Joseph Kauser have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
July 7: 25-year-old Micah Johnson—a sniper, and a black Army veteran—killed five police officers and injured seven others in Dallas, Texas, at a peaceful protest against the previous days’ police shootings. Police killed Johnson, who allegedly said he wanted to kill white police officers in response to Sterling’s and Castile’s deaths, The New York Times reported.
It was a surreal three days.
Since Sterling’s death, social media has hosted a resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which started nearly three years ago when George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Political leaders and social justice advocates are taking to Facebook and Twitter to express outrage over the police shootings, saying they demonstrate institutionalized racism and a broken justice system.
Meanwhile, the Dallas shooting has thrown law enforcement communities across the nation into grief. The sentiment has reached the Central Coast, as well, where local police officers—including those of the Lompoc Police Department—are wearing mourning bands across their badges in memory of the officers killed on July 7.
In an emailed statement to the Sun, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said preconceived notions of law enforcement ultimately led to the Dallas shooting.
“Instead of waiting for investigations to be conducted, instead of waiting for all the facts to come in, instead of calling for calm and patience in the wake of these two tragic incidents, [some political leaders and media outlets] instead chose to fan the flames of anti-police discontent and hatred by making hasty, irresponsible, and inflammatory editorial comments,” Brown’s statement said.
Chris Nartatez, interim police chief at Allan Hancock College, told the Sun the Dallas shooting was particularly angering because it attacked officers patrolling a peaceful protest against the recent police shootings.
“This was a peaceful demonstration in Dallas, which is a privilege that Americans have,” Nartatez said. “But then you bring in cowards that want to come in and cause havoc at a peaceful demonstration—not just cause havoc, but with the intention to kill police officers.”
Nartatez, who said he has been in law enforcement for 38 years, claimed he’s never seen as much disrespect for police as he does today.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” he said. “I believe that the atmosphere has changed. When I started in law enforcement back in the mid-’70s, the respect for police was much higher than it is now. And now you just have people that sometimes want to go against authority.”
That said, Nartatez added that while police have the power to take a person’s liberty away, they have no right to take away someone’s dignity.
“When you arrest somebody, you need to treat them right,” he said. “And at times, when we try to enforce the law, we do have resistance, and then the officer has to make sure that he doesn’t go overboard to overcome that resistance.”
Nartatez said that in situations where officers have gone “overboard,” they are held responsible for their actions. But members of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are asking for a higher standard—they say the justice system has made too many excuses for police brutality, particularly against black people.
Community psychologist Gail Jean Padilla published a pro-“Black Lives Matter” editorial on Edhat after marching through Santa Barbara with protesters following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.
“Three simple and to-the-point words, ‘black lives matter,’ asserts value, power, and agency for a community historically denied it,” Padilla wrote in her editorial. “It’s a push for grand-scale awareness, and stakes claim to inherent human rights.”
And while many marginalized groups suffer inequality under law enforcement, Padilla wrote, none have suffered quite as much as black people. Reflecting on the recent shootings, Padilla told the Sun she hopes to see more active responses from people hoping to end this pattern.
“Something needs to change,” she said. “We keep repeating ourselves. The deaths are a repeat. We need a new kind of organization. Something has to change in the motivation of what gets people involved.”
She said people should create “sustainable dialogues” about the reasons behind police violence—not just share emotionally charged Facebook posts.
“The quickness with which people are responding and the cookie-cutter responses suggest to me that people aren’t critically thinking about it,” Padilla said. “Ask yourself: ‘What do I do about it, in my own microcosmic reality? Where am I the police officer? Where did I react just because he was that color?’”
But many, such as former UC Santa Barbara police officer Dan Hilker, don’t think race should factor into analyses of police violence.
“Look at these incidents just as one person taking the life of another,” Hilker told the Sun. “To charge it with race, you look at it differently. You have to be colorblind.”
He said that while police killings of black people appear to be an “epidemic,” there aren’t statistics to back it up. In fact, those statistics don’t exist at all: Government agencies don’t maintain data on police use of excessive force (even though Congress instructed the Attorney General to do so in 1994).
Hilker said police brutality is nothing new—it’s just being reported on more frequently.
“I think if you went back in time, the same types of things happened in the past,” he said. “We just weren’t privy to them.”
Sheriff Brown said in his statement that the media and its consumers should stop focusing on the “tiny fraction” of police-civilian encounters that go badly.
“Cops don’t go to work intending to harm people,” Brown’s statement said. “Our intention is to avoid and prevent harm. Sometimes we have to make split-second decisions in highly volatile, dangerous situations that may have grave and far-reaching consequences.”
Nartatez joined the circle of talk show hosts, politicians, and fellow law enforcement officers calling for more unity on the issue—where being pro-police doesn’t have to mean being anti-black, and vice versa.
“We need to learn to grow as a community, and in growing, police have to be part of the community,” Nartatez said. “It shouldn’t be ‘us versus them.’ It should be, if anything, ‘us versus evil.’”
Staff Writer Brenna Swanston can be reached at bswanston@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.