Last week, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, police released video from a nighttime SWAT raid on the home of a man suspected of selling marijuana—yes, marijuana—during which officers fatally shot his mother, 72-year-old Geraldine Townsend, after she fired a BB gun at the officers. As he is being cuffed and dragged from the house, Mike Townsend can be heard pleading with the officers to let him see his dying mother, but they refuse.
In December, Wichita, Kansas, police received what turned out to be a prank call regarding a non-existent hostage situation at the home of Andrew Finch. When the 28-year-old father of two went outside to investigate the flashing emergency lights, SWAT officers yelled at him to “Show your hands” and “Walk this way.” Seconds later, one of the officers shot and killed him. Andrew Finch was unarmed.
That same month, a six-year-old San Antonio boy was killed by deputies who were shooting at a suspected car thief, also unarmed, on the front porch of the boy’s mobile home. Two weeks before that, former Mesa County, Arizona, officer Philip Brailsford was acquitted of murder for shooting an unarmed man, Daniel Shaver, as he begged for his life in the hallway of a motel. And back in July, Justine Damond was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her house. Damond too was unarmed.
Lack of systematic record-keeping makes it difficult to quantify the scope of the problem with precision, but according to The Washington Post, of the roughly 1000 people shot and killed by police last year, at least seven percent were unarmed. A study by Vice News of all shootings by police, including non-fatal ones, suggests the numbers are even worse: 20 percent of people shot by police were unarmed.
No one denies that police have a difficult, dangerous, and sometimes scary job, nor should we forget the heroism of officers like those who threw themselves between citizens and mass shooter Micah Johnson during a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas in July 2016. But the time has come for a national conversation about the risks we expect officers to take in order to avoid shooting innocent people like Andrew Finch, Daniel Shaver, and Justine Damond—and also to ensure that they avoid creating unnecessarily dangerous situations by staging gratuitous nighttime SWAT raids to serve low-level drug warrants.