No, I’m not talking about Eve Marie Carson, the white, blond, 22 year old UNC coed and Student Body President who was found shot to death and lying in a public street in Chapel Hill, NC, even though that is truly a tragic story. Indeed, it’s one of the most viewed stories at The Huffington Post, and all the major cable news networks have already broadcast the tale of her terrible fate repeatedly. Sadly, missing and dead young white women are standard fare for the national news media these days, and the more attractive and young the better, it seems.
But I am writing here to tell you about another woman who was shot and killed, with a lot less fanfare and little if any coverage of her death from the national news media. Her name is Anita Gay and she was shot dead by a police officer in Berkeley, California. She wasn’t white and she wasn’t young, but her story deserves to be told just as much as the story of Eve Carson. Maybe moreso.
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The family of a 51-year-old Berkeley woman fatally shot by a police officer just outside her apartment Saturday night has hired Oakland attorney John Burris with the intention of filing a wrongful-death lawsuit, the lawyer said Tuesday.
Berkeley police said a preliminary investigation into the shooting of Anita Gay at 1727 Ward St., where she lived with two daughters and two granddaughters, found that Officer Rashawn Cummings had been justified in opening fire.
Gay, who according to witnesses appeared drunk, raised a 10-inch knife at her adult daughters, who were standing near the door of the apartment about 8 p.m. during an argument that prompted a 911 call, said police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, a department spokeswoman.
Burris said Tuesday that the shooting was unnecessary and reckless.
He said several witnesses, including Gay’s daughters, have told him that Gay had made a move toward the door – which was up a short flight of stairs – but had not been holding the knife when she was shot in the back.
The officer fired even though the daughters, who lived with Gay, were in the line of fire, Burris said. He said one of the daughters, standing just inside the apartment, had been grazed in the left eyebrow by a bullet.
“This was a woman who was intoxicated and having real family issues,” Burris said of Gay. “It seems like a situation that could have been controlled without resorting to deadly force.”
Anita Gay was shot in the back. By a police officer. That fact isn’t in dispute. His story: she was a danger to him and to her daughters and that is why he had to shoot her in the back two times, killing her at the scene. The story of other witnesses, including her daughters: she was intoxicated, and was not threatening the police officer or her family members when the police officer fired his gun. It’s an all too familiar story when the police shoot and kill a black man or woman. The police claim the “shoot” was justified. Everyone who isn’t a police officer has a different tale to tell.
We never hear about these stories much in the national news media, stories of African American or Latina women who are murdered, or killed by the police, or by their husbands, boyfriends, other family members or strangers. But such violent deaths occur at a rate far greater than those of their white sisters.
# African American women are more likely to be the victims of violent crimes (56 cases per 1,000) than either Caucasian women (42 cases per 1,000) or Hispanic women (52 cases per 1,000). Between 1987 and 1991, they had the highest rate of aggravated assault (8 per 1,000). African American women also have the highest rate of violent victimizations by an acquaintance or friend.
# Among American Indian/Alaska Native women of all ages, the mortality rate from homicide was 5.1 per 100,000 persons in 1997. The rate of violent victimization was 98 per 1,000 females, a rate significantly higher than that found among all other women. Among the different age groups, violent crime rates were the highest (232 per 1,000 persons) for persons aged 18 to 24 in this population group. This violent crime rate was more than twice that found among Caucasians (101 per 1,000) and African Americans (105 per 1,000) of the same age.
# Among all women, Hispanic women are the third most likely group to be victims of violent crimes. Aggravated assault was more common among Hispanic women (7 per 1,000) than among Caucasian women (5 per 1,000). However, Hispanic women had a lower rate of victimizations by acquaintances or friends (10 per 1,000) than African American women (17 per 1,000) or Caucasian women (13 per 1,000).
Those are pretty damning statistics, but the deaths they represent aren’t considered newsworthy events, at least not by our national news media. Even when the woman is shot in the back by a police officer. I don’t dismiss the tragedy of young white women whose deaths garner national attention, but when the media covers such stories obsessively, it sends the clear message that their deaths, and implicitly their lives, have much greater value in our society than the lives and the tragic deaths of women of color. And if that isn’t evidence of institutional racism by the corporate media organizations that determine which events are worth informing the public about and which are not, I don’t know what is.
At least the Berkeley Police Review Commission voted unanimously to investigate the circumstances of Anita’s death, citing “concerns of police misconduct.” And her family is suing the City of Berkeley for wrongful death. Perhaps in death she will receive the justice she was denied in life. I just wish that the story of her tragic end was deemed of at least equal importance to the tragic story of Eve Carson by those who report the news. That they didn’t deem the killing of Anita Gay as significant as the killing of Eve Carson, or of Terry Schiavo for that matter (whose imminent demise was literally made a matter of national importance by Congress and President Bush) tells us all we need to know about the value our society places on the lives of people who are not white like me.
