Originally published August 5th, 2016
In doing my research on Charles Smith Jr., I dug up this old piece. Korryn Gaines’ death bothered me because her intervention should of went differently. For various misdemeanors, this woman was shot dead in her apartment; her child, hit in the crossfire. Later examination would show that Gaines had a history of mental health issues that would make any brush with violence tragic. Yet police were sent instead of social workers and mental health specialists.
This reposting feels incomplete; I am missing all the links to my research and the various pictures. But I wanted to present it to show how my views on criminal justice, gestating since my first blog, was jarred by Gaines’ preventable death.
On February 1st, 2002, Officer Jack David Cooper of the Little Rock Police Department (LRPD) lost his life in the line of duty. He was summoned to help restrain a mentally ill man who was complaining of vampires in his vicinity. The suspect eventually seized Officer Cooper’s gun and shot him in the head. Other police in the area returned fire, permanently ending whatever apparitions that were haunting the suspect.
Officer Cooper’s name appears on page six in the Laux report, though it does not mention his death or the mental health of the suspect. But the names of the mentally ill in the report, however, quickly become a ledger of death. Officer Greg Smith shot a mentally ill man on April 2001; on September 2006, Officers Byron Harper and Jarmall Lovelace shot another mentally ill man; Officer Spurgeon Levy tailed up his first shooting into the body of a mentally sick man on March 2007. Of the officers listed, Smith, Harper, and Lovelace either had a previous incident in the use of deadly force or would soon establish one in the LRPD. Lovelace also had two criminal complaints lodged against him for child and domestic abuse.
One police in particular, Officer Christopher Johannes, triggered six Early Intervention System (EIS) warnings before his beating of a mentally ill Leon Eskridge in March 2010. The LRPD uses EIS to track officers who are prone to use of force incidents. Using this data driven approach, they hope to correct and retain cops who use violence as a first resort in their police work. Officer Johannes quickly proved himself to be a breaker of men. His EIS report tells of regular, unrestrained use of violence against suspects—attaching their legs, beating up suspects in custody, throwing them into freeway dividers, beating them with his baton. As a result, he as a result, he triggered a staggering five EIS alarms over dozens of incidents before his battering of Eskridge. He was undisciplined for all but two of them. A year after Eskridge, Officer Johannes would shoot two black teenagers at Park Place Mall who he accused—and eyewitnesses disproved—of trying to run him over.
As the LRPD’s data shows us, violence abhors a vacuum. It is not like lightening, a natural force that does damage when it strikes a hapless mortal. It is like electricity—energy converted into a tool, given purpose by its shaper. These shapers work in American cities; the energy they harness is generally used to visit various tragedies on black communities.
Mental illness potentially stalked Korryn Gaines of Baltimore. Four days ago, police shot her dead in her apartment when they were coming to serve arrest warrants for various misdemeanors stemming from an earlier traffic stop; her child was hit in the arm during the crossfire. Police report that Gaines, armed with a shotgun and her five year old child in her hands, threated officers who tried to peacefully enter her home with a key. Shaun King has done much to dispute that narrative.
I am not here—and For the Dead and the Dying does not exist—to discuss what Gaines deserved that evening. She was a black woman living in Baltimore, and I am writing to clarify the context in which she lived and how it pertains to the police and the ill of Little Rock. Gaines lived in a city that has arrested so many black people they cannot properly stock juries anymore. She worked in a town that has used police force not to improve safety, but to buttress the political campaigns of mayors, governors, and men who would be president. She was raising a son in a place where, in ten years’ time, he would have to contend with the same forces that took his mother’s life.
He would also have to make his way in a city designed to break his mind. Ta-Nehisi Coates did the work and made the argument of how housing segregation in American cities have shaped the fates of millions of black folk who could not choose their homes. Gaines is a product of her parents having to choose substandard housing. She suffered from lead poisoning and was suing previous landlords for it. Her condition leads to impulsive decision making and outbursts of anger. And it is primarily the poor—and in the modern American city, we are talking about blacks—who are still exposed to lead, and stress, and other contaminants of the mind without recourse.
Rather than treating our sick, our government sends in practiced users of violence. We have to question as a nation which situations are appropriate for the bloodletting to occur, and whether or not the mentally ill, suffering from visions of a damaged mind, deserve this sort of treatment. News about Gaines and her orphan are still emerging; I do not believe, though, a person should have been killed over a misdemeanor. My fear is that incidents similar to both Gaines and Officer Cooper—the police and the policed—will occur if we choose to send enforcers instead of healers to our mentally ill. My fear is that their black lives will continue to not matter, and our sick will be shot down rather than treated.