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The Troublesome Death of Korryn Gaines

The Troublesome Death of Korryn Gaines

Last updated on: August 4, 2016 at 2:12 am by Tom Swiss

The Troublesome Death of Korryn Gaines 2016-08-04T02:12:27-04:00 Tom Swiss

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Baltimore is an independent city; Baltimore City and Baltimore County are entirely separate political entities with separate police forces. So the county police who killed Korryn Gaines on Monday after an armed standoff were not on the same force as the city police who killed Freddie Gray last year.

Those county cops were, however, on the same force as those who three years ago conducted a fatal midnight raid on a house in the historic African-American Winters Lane community. That neighborhood is about two miles from my house, but in an entirely different universe demographically than my lily-white street. In that incident, police killed Tevon Smith while serving a “no knock” warrant[Anderson, “Officer”] — a warrant for a suspect who wasn’t even in the house at the time and who was later acquitted.[Anderson, “Jurors”] One of the “tactical officers” — the euphemism for the paramilitary police who routinely conduct violent home invasions these days — was killed when Smith, quite likely not knowing that those crashing into his home had the permission of the state to do so, attempted to defend himself and his family before he himself was killed.

So for those who are critical of police violence (still too small a group, but growing) the killing of Gaines takes place in the context of another questionable homicide by the same force as well as the growing consciousness of the general problem.

At least in the Gaines case the police did not use blitzkrieg “no knock” tactics; perhaps they learned something from the Smith incident. According to police reports (always a questionable source, but let’s accept them provisionally) they announced themselves and knocked for about ten minutes. Getting no response but hearing people inside, they got a key from the landlord and entered, to find Gaines sitting on the floor holding a shotgun in one hand, her other arm wrapped around her 5-year-old-son. A stand-off ensued for several hours.[Lowery]

From Korryn Gaines's Instagram account. Fair use.

From Korryn Gaines’s Instagram account. Fair use.

Many have questioned the BCoPD’s decision to shoot first rather than to continue efforts to resolve the situation peacefully. As Shaun King notes,

They claim that Korryn Gaines then pointed a gun at them. From that point forward the police said they called in a tactical team, but many hours later, around 3:00 p.m., she told police she would kill them if they came in.

Police decided to go ahead and shoot her instead, killing her. Police do not dispute that they shot first. They claim she shot at them after they shot at her. Her young son was shot in the process and is currently hospitalized.

If Korryn Gaines is now dead and her son, without his mother, is shot, who exactly did the police aim to protect in that house? It was surrounded. She couldn’t leave. It appears that police just didn’t feel like waiting it out any longer. Why not? Was her life not worth the wait? Was her son’s life not worth the wait?

The police first arrived around 9:20 am; the shooting took place around 3 pm.[Lowery] So this wasn’t even a full work day’s worth of waiting.

How much time is a human life worth? And is the life of a black woman with signs of neurological impairment worth less than the life of another citizen?

Apologists for the shooting have argued “well, what do you expect when you point a gun at the police?” But King points out many recent cases in which people — white male people — did just that and were arrested without being injured or killed:

A white man, 62-year-old William Bruce Ray, first pointed his shotgun at incoming traffic, fired a handgun at police, then threatened a deputy with his shotgun, before reaching again for his handgun. Guess how many times police shot good old Willie Ray? None. They subdued and arrested him without firing a single shot.

In a fit of road rage, Anthony Vigilotti pointed a handgun directly at a police officer, but was arrested later that day without incident. From his mugshot, it doesn’t even look like he received a scratch in the process.

Jed Frazier pointed his handgun directly at police, but “officers and medics took shelter and continued to make contact with Frazier. Shortly before 3 a.m. Police say they broke the windows in the truck and extricated Frazier. Frazier was treated for minor injuries before being taken to the Lawrence County Jail.”

In a quick search, I found a dozen similar stories from July alone.[King]

It’s hard to look at that and not conclude either that racial bias was involved, or that the Baltimore County Police were notably incompetent in dealing with an obviously disturbed individual. (Perhaps both are true.)

And Gaines was, sadly, an obviously disturbed individual. The arrest warrant for her stemmed from her failing to appear in court after a bizarre traffic violation a few months ago. She was pulled over for having no license plate — instead she had a small cardboard sign reading, “Any Government official who compromises this pursuit to happiness and right to travel, will be criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom.”[Weiner]

Now, I’m not entirely opposed to that as a philosophical argument. The right to travel is basic; it’s problematic for the state to first create a physical infrastructure in which it is effectively necessary to operate a private vehicle to fully participate in social and economic life, and then to put all sorts of prior restrictions on such operation.

(My friends in areas with functional public transit may not understand this, but Baltimore’s public transit is nearly useless. If you’re well-off enough to live in certain walkable or bikeable areas near your job, or along the limited mass transit that is available, you may be able to get by without a car; otherwise one is a necessity for a decent standard of living.)

But taking that up directly with police rather than through the political system is not the behavior of someone mentally and neurologically healthy. According to police reports she refused to provide her license and registration and told the police they would have to “murder” her if they wanted her to leave the car.

Here too, rather than wait her out — no one can stay in a car forever — police forcibly removed her from the car, escalating the situation with violence. That escalation didn’t pay off immediately, but collected interest until it was paid in gunfire on Monday.

According to a 2012 lawsuit filed by Gaines, she suffered from exposure to “a sea of lead” paint as a child, resulting in a history of impulse control problems, neurocognitive impairment, and intelligence loss.[Weiner] It seems likely that her behavior was the result of a combination of the neurologically toxic physical environment in which she spent much of her childhood and the mentally toxic racist sociopolitical environment in which she lived her short adult life.

In a way there’s a resonance between the widespread poisoning and police violence that affects our poorest citizens and the fatal flooding of Ellicott City last weekend I wrote about in our last installment; bad policy decisions about the built environment have deadly long-term consequences. Just as the danger of flooding due to overdevelopment and overpaving was known long ago but no significant action was taken to mitigate it, the dangers posed to people living in a homes where lead paint was used were known to the industry since at least 1904,[Guenther], while the dangers bad policing posed to society have been understood since at least the late 1960s, when the landmark report The Challenge of Crime In A Free Society [President’s] was issued. But as law professor and former police officer and police chief Michael S. Scott concluded,

If one of the goals of the 1967 President’s Commission, and of similar reform proposals of that era, was to reduce the overreliance on the criminal justice system as a means of controlling crime and promoting public order, there is little to suggest that goal has been achieved. Local criminal court systems across the country are as inundated as ever….Even while record numbers of offenders are being prosecuted, sentenced, and shipped off to prison, prosecutors are struggling to divert even greater numbers of cases and offenders from the system….

If overburdened criminal justice resources were the only problem caused by the heavy use police make of criminal arrest, that problem would at least theoretically be easy to solve by adding more resources. But, of course, this is not the only problem. Use of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration over the past four decades as the preferred means for controlling crime and maintaining public order has not had an equal impact on all sectors of society. It has most profoundly affected the very minority communities whose strained relations with the police precipitated much of the national interest in the police in the 1960s.[Scott] [emphasis added]

Envisioning the long-term consequences of our actions is something we are very bad at in this country. And that seems to apply at several levels: individually, to those suffering from neurological damage and poor impulse control; institutionally, to our police forces suffering from a culture of corruption, brutality, and secrecy; and politically, to our elected officials suffering from greed- and power-induced shortsightedness.

And so we are the proverbial goldfish, stunned every time by the appearance of that plastic castle as we swim in circles and the same story repeats. We’ve seen mentally disturbed low-status people like Korryn Gaines killed before, and we’ll see them killed again, until something fundamental changes in our society and our politics and we become capable of remembering how the past brought us to the present, and envisioning how the present will create the future.

It would take us choosing the path of Athena over that of Ares, and that seems unlikely to happen soon.

Anderson, Jessica. “Jurors find teen not guilty in shooting case that led to fatal Catonsville raid.” Baltimore Sun, 22 May 2014. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/catonsville/bs-md-co-stanford-trial-day-2-20140522-story.html

Anderson, Jessica and Kevin Rector. “Officer killed while serving warrant in Catonsville.” Baltimore Sun, 28 Aug 2013. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/catonsville/bs-md-co-catonsville-shooting-20130828-story.html

Guenther, Richard (1904-02-24). “Dangers of White Lead”. Hathitrust. Sherwin Williams Co. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433066401898;view=2up;seq=110;skin=mobile

Lowery, Wesley. “Korryn Gaines, cradling child and shotgun, is fatally shot by police.” Washington Post, 2 Aug 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/08/02/korryn-gaines-is-the-ninth-black-woman-shot-and-killed-by-police-this-year/?utm_term=.c24614aacd05

King, Shaun. “Cynicism toward Korryn Gaines, Baltimore mom killed by cops, illustrates power of white privilege.” New York Daily News, 2 Aug 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-cynicism-mom-slain-cops-illustrates-white-privilege-article-1.2735539

President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. “The Police”. Chapter 4, The Challenge of Crime In A Free Society. U.S. Government Printing Office; Washington DC, 1967. https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=42

Scott, Michael S. “Progress in American Policing? Reviewing the National Reviews.” Law & Social Inquiry, Volume 34, Issue 1, 171–185, Winter 2008. https://media.law.wisc.edu/m/g2ytq/progress_in_policing.pdf

Weiner, Rachel and Lynh Bui. “Korryn Gaines, killed by police in standoff, posted parts of encounter on social media.” Washington Post, 2 Aug 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/maryland-woman-shot-by-police-in-standoff-posted-part-of-encounter-on-social-media/2016/08/02/d4650ee6-58cc-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html

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