Pubdate: Mon, 17 Aug 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Richard A. Oppel

WITHOUT RELEASE OF VIDEO, POLICE SHOOTING OF WHITE DRIVER GETS LESS PUBLICITY

To Zachary Hammond's supporters, the shooting death of the 
19-year-old man was yet another example of questionable police 
behavior that has shaken communities around the country.

In their view, the police in Seneca, S.C., falsely claimed Mr. 
Hammond was shot last month as he tried to drive his car over the 
officer who fired on him, when his wounds show he was actually shot 
from the side and back.

They also say the deadly confrontation, in which officers approached 
with their guns drawn and screaming profanities, evolved from an 
absurd sting effort to trap his date into selling a tiny amount of 
marijuana, a drug now decriminalized in much of the country.

Yet the case has not received as much attention as the 
officer-involved shooting deaths of Walter L. Scott in North 
Charleston, S.C., or Samuel DuBose, a motorist who was killed in 
Cincinnati. Like both of those men, Mr. Hammond was apparently unarmed.

Unlike them, he was white. And his family's attorney, Eric Bland, 
contends that is why most people have never heard of Mr. Hammond.

"If Zachary were black, the outpouring of protest and disappointment 
from the public and the press would be amazing," Mr. Bland said. "You 
wouldn't be able to get a hotel room in upstate South Carolina."

There are major differences aside from race - most notably, 
investigators have refused to release a police dashboard camera video 
that may show Mr. Hammond's death, while graphic videos of the 
killing of Mr. Scott, Mr. DuBose and other African-Americans quickly 
went viral, galvanizing outrage. And in some cases, prosecutors have 
swiftly brought charges against officers; the local prosecutor in 
South Carolina, Chrissy T. Adams, said in an email that she would not 
decide whether to file charges until state investigators had 
completed their report on the shooting.

The Justice Department did not disclose its own investigation into 
Mr. Hammond's death until Wednesday, 17 days after the shooting, 
which happened in a Hardee's restaurant parking lot. Nor did the 
department say why it had opened the inquiry.

But a Fox television affiliate in Greenville, S.C., reported that the 
Hammond family's lawyers had requested the investigation in a letter 
to the Justice Department. The letter suggested that a witness might 
have seen evidence planted on Mr. Hammond's corpse, and that Seneca 
police officers had raised Mr. Hammond's hand to "high-five" him 
after he had been killed. Mr. Bland did not return an email seeking 
comment on the report.

It is not clear how often the Justice Department investigates police 
killings of blacks compared with whites. A justice official said the 
department did not track civil rights inquiries or subsequent 
prosecutions related to the conduct of law enforcement officials or 
prison guards based on the race of the victims. That is because the 
two statutes that provide for such inquiries, which led to criminal 
charges in 47 cases against 70 defendants in the most recent fiscal 
year, do not require race to be a factor.

Regarding the level of attention given to Mr. Hammond's death, a 
search of the Nexis news database showed that in the three weeks 
after he was killed, including the night of his death, there were 145 
mentions of "Zachary Hammond" and "police" or "Zach Hammond" and 
"police" in United States newspapers and wire services. By 
comparison, there were 704 mentions of "Samuel DuBose" and "police" 
or "Sam DuBose" and "police" in the similar period after his death, 
and 1,593 mentions of "Walter L. Scott" and "police" or "Walter 
Scott" and "police" in the similar initial period.

The lack of publicly disclosed video of Mr. Hammond's death helps 
explain much of why it has not drawn more notice, said Richard Cohen, 
president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a longtime civil-rights 
organization based in Montgomery, Ala.

Yet he added: "The reality is that this killing maybe doesn't get 
quite as much attention because it doesn't fit into the current 
narrative that's sweeping the country."

Mr. Cohen said Mr. Hammond's death "reflects that police violence is 
not confined to one race of victims."

Still, black Americans suffer disproportionate police violence. "And 
there is no doubt that police violence has racial dimensions, because 
communities of color are so much more heavily patrolled than white 
communities," and because many officers - and many people generally - 
believe there is a greater presumption of danger with 
African-Americans, Mr. Cohen said.

David J. Leonard, an associate professor and chairman of the 
department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington 
State University, said that despite highly publicized cases like the 
deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Freddie Gray in 
Baltimore, many questionable deaths of minorities still received 
little attention.

"There are countless other cases involving African-Americans in the 
past year that have not received coverage anywhere near the level of 
Zachary Hammond," Professor Leonard said. Yet he said much of the 
attention the Hammond case received on Twitter was spurred by Black 
Lives Matter activists.

While whites, who outnumber blacks in the United States more than 5 
to 1, are shot and killed more often by police officers, 
African-Americans are proportionately much more likely to be killed, 
studies show.

Calls to the Seneca police, the Oconee County, S.C., coroner, and a 
lawyer for Lt. Mark Tiller, the officer who killed Mr. Hammond, were 
not returned. Ms. Adams, the local prosecutor, said she could not 
discuss the case.

Mr. Bland, the Hammond family's lawyer, said a pathology report by 
private doctors contradicted the police account, finding that Mr. 
Hammond's injuries were "from left to right and back to front" and 
were consistent with "being seated in a motor vehicle and being shot 
from the side of the vehicle through an open driver's side window." 
That means Lieutenant Tiller fired while standing near the side 
window, where he could not have been at risk of being run down at the 
time, Mr. Bland said.

"These aren't magic bullets, and they don't take left turns," he said.

Lieutenant Tiller's lawyer has said Mr. Hammond accelerated toward 
the officer, who had to "push off" the car to avoid being run over, 
and then fired two shots "to stop the continuing threat to himself 
and the general public." The officer's lawyer also said "a white 
powdery substance" had been found on Mr. Hammond.

Mr. Bland also contends that another officer at the scene never fired 
because "he obviously didn't see that any deadly force was required." 
And the lawyer said the premise for the confrontation was ludicrous: 
a sting effort to buy what he said was less than 10 grams of 
marijuana from Mr. Hammond's 23-year-old date, a passenger in the car.

"They weren't coming for Osama bin Laden," Mr. Bland said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom