White Cleveland Cops Claim Harsher Treatment When They Shoot Black Suspects

The cops involved in the fatal 2012 shooting of
Timothy Russell and Marissa Williams, which occurred at the end of
a 25 minute car chase involving at least 26 cops, are now suing for
being treated unfairly by the department because they’re not black
and their victims are.

The chase began when a cop mistook the backfire of a car for
gunshots. The city of Cleveland settled with the families for

$3 million last month. Only one of the 13 cops who shot at
Russell’s car was charged, with involuntary manslaughter. He jumped
onto the hood of the car and fired at least 15 rounds into the
windshield. Five other cops were charged with dereliction of duty
for allowing the car chase to get out of control. T

The other 12 cops involved in the shooting all got slaps on the
wrist and a little bit of paid time off. But that minimal
punishment cost the cops promotions they would have apparently been
given otherwise, according to a lawsuit by 9 of them,
as CNN reports:

“The City of Cleveland, through the other named defendants, and
the other named defendants in their individual capacities, have a
history of treating non-African American officers involved in the
shootings of African Americans substantially harsher than African
American officers,” reads the lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.

It continues: “A serious dichotomy exists as a result of the
defendants’ longstanding practices and procedures which place
onerous burdens on non-African American officers, including the
plaintiffs, because of their race and the race of persons who are
the subjects of the legitimate use of deadly force.”

The plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of damages.

It’s hard to tell when black officers are involved in fatal
shootings—only white cops tend to have their race specifically
identified in media reports about police shootings.

Neither the race nor identity of the Cleveland cops who shot
12-year-old Tamir Rice last month has been revealed. The attorney
for the Rice family
said the shooting wasn’t a “black and white issue” but a “right
and wrong issue.”

Insofar as the allegations in the lawsuit are true, they should
be rectified by applying harsher treatment to black cops involved
in fatal shootings not by giving white cops involved in fatal
shootings an easier time.

A ProPublica
analysis of police shootings found it 21 times more likely for
a black person to be a victim of a fatal police shooting than a
white person. It also found that while 44 percent of police
shooting victims it found in the last 33 years were white, for
black officers more than 78 percent of their victims were black.
Black officers were involved in about 10 percent of all fatal
police shootings—in 2007 the Department of Justice found that
about 25 percent of police officers in the U.S. are non-white.

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