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.
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.