Special Investigation: Native Americans Are Being Killed by Police at a Higher Rate Than Any Other Group
SUQUAMISH TRIBE DESCENDANT JEANETTA RILEY, A 34-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF FOUR, LAY FACEDOWN ON A SANDPOINT, IDAHO, STREET. One minute earlier, three police officers had arrived, summoned by staff at a nearby hospital. Her husband had sought help there because Riley—homeless, pregnant and with a history of mental illness—was threatening suicide. Riley had a knife in her right hand and was sitting in the couple’s parked van.
Wearing body armor and armed with an assault rifle and Glock pistols, the officers quickly closed in on Riley—one moving down the sidewalk toward the van, the other two crossing the roadway. They shouted instructions at her—to walk toward them, show them her hands. Cursing them, she refused.
“Drop the knife!” they yelled, advancing, then opened fire.
They pumped two shots into her chest and another into her back as she fell to the pavement. Fifteen seconds had elapsed from the time they exited their vehicles.
That July evening in 2014, Riley became another Native American killed by police. Patchy government data collection makes it hard to know the complete tally. The Washington Post and the Guardian (U.K.) have both developed databases to fill in the gaps, but even these sometimes misidentify or omit Native victims.
To get a clearer picture, Mike Males, senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, looked at data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected from medical examiners in 47 states between 1999 and 2011. When compared to their percentage of the U.S. population, Natives were more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African Americans. By age, Natives 20-24, 25-34 and 35–44 were three of the five groups most likely to be killed by police. (The other two groups were African Americans 20-24 and 25-34.) Males’ analysis of CDC data from 1999 to 2014 shows that Native Americans are 3.1 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.
Yet these killings of Native people go almost entirely unreported by mainstream U.S. media. In a paper presented in April at a Western Social Science Association meeting, Claremont Graduate University researchers Roger Chin, Jean Schroedel and Lily Rowen reviewed articles about deaths-by-cop published between May 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, in the top 10 U.S. newspapers by circulation: the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.
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This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.
Corey Kanosh, an unarmed 35-year-old Paiute man, died in the Utah desert on Oct. 15, 2012. Police, believing the car in which he was a passenger to be stolen, chased it to a stop. After Corey got out of the car, police shot him and left him overnight. In the morning, he was pronounced dead.
Corey Kanosh, an unarmed 35-year-old Paiute man, died in the Utah desert on Oct. 15, 2012. Police, believing the car in which he was a passenger to be stolen, chased it to a stop. After Corey got out of the car, police shot him and left him overnight. In the morning, he was pronounced dead.
On Dec. 30, 2014, just one day after attending a Native Lives Matter protest, Allen Locke was shot and killed by a police officer in his Rapid City, S.D., home. A police investigation found the shooting justified because the 30-year-old Lakota man was holding a knife.
Of the 29 Native Americans killed by police during that time, only one received sustained coverage—Paul Castaway, a Rosebud Sioux man shot dead in Denver while threatening suicide. The Denver Post ran six articles, totaling 2,577 words. The killing of Suquamish tribal member Daniel Covarrubias, shot when he reached for his cell phone, received a total of 515 words in the Washington Post and the New York Times (which misidentified him as Latino). The other 27 deaths received no coverage.
Compare this media blackout with the coverage of the next-most-likely group to be killed by police. The researchers found that the 10 papers devoted hundreds of articles to the 413 African Americans killed by police in that period, as well as to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and police violence more broadly. That’s largely a testament to the power of the BLM movement, which exploded after the Aug. 9, 2014 killing of Michael Brown. When Minneapolis police killed both White Earth Ojibwe tribal member Philip Quinn, 30, and African-American Jamar Clark, 24, during the fall of 2015, Clark’s story was well-reported, while Quinn’s passing, like those of almost all other Native victims, was barely noted.
Nor did major media report on a spate of Native jailhouse deaths in 2015. The statistics on “death by legal intervention”—a term used by the CDC to describe fatalities at the hands of police—include those that occur in custody prior to sentencing. Whether the deaths are due to police action or neglect, the department is considered accountable. “When people are in custody, law enforcement has control of them and a responsibility for their welfare,” Males explains.
A report commissioned by Alaska’s Gov. Bill Walker found that Joseph Murphy, an Alaska Native veteran of the Iraq War, died of a heart attack in a holding cell in Juneau in August 2015, as jail staff yelled “fuck you” and “I don’t care” in response to his pleas. According to the report, Larry Kobuk, identified in news articles as a 33-year-old Alaska Native, who had a heart condition known to his jailers, died in January 2015 while being held face down by four officers. Sarah Lee Circle Bear, a 24-year-old Sioux mother of two jailed in South Dakota, died after reportedly complaining of pain and being refused medical care. (At the Democratic National Convention, Sandra Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, who has become a vocal activist in the movement for black lives, pointed out that Circle Bear’s death occurred during the same month her daughter died in police custody—July 2015.)
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The list of 2015 deaths goes on: 53-year-old Choctaw medicine man Rexdale Henry, in a jail cell in Mississippi; Alaska Native Gilbert Joseph, 57, in Alaska; Yurok tribal member Raymond Eacret, 34, in California. On the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s reservation in South Dakota, an angry crowd marched on police headquarters after tribal member Phillip High Bear’s mother alleged her 33-year-old son was beaten to death there. Protestors sang, drummed and shouted taunting references to the 1890 shooting death of Lakota spiritual leader Sitting Bull at the hands of Native police officers.
Yet even this story received no coverage in the 10 largest papers. The Claremont researchers stress that they are not criticizing the important attention paid to the movement for black lives, but they note that a larger narrative is at play: Racial issues in the United States tend to be framed as black and white, while other groups are ignored.
But Native Americans’ experiences of violence and discrimination in the United States often parallel those of African Americans. Federal investigations have found that on the borders of reservations, Native Americans are treated as second-class citizens by police and public agencies in ways that echo the experience of black Americans in towns like Ferguson, Mo.
Rexdale Henry, a 53-year-old Choctaw medicine man, was arrested in Philadelphia, Miss., for a minor traffic violation and outstanding tickets. On July 14, 2015, he was found dead in his jail cell. Henry’s cellmate was charged with his murder, but the details of the death are unclear.
After telling jailers that she was in excruciating pain, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, 24, was found dead in her Aberdeen, S.D., holding cell on July 5, 2015. Police later said the Lakota woman died from a meth overdose, but her family notes that she had been in police custody for two days before she died.
Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, 18, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, was Tasered twice and shot seven times in his Clinton, Okla., home by police on Dec. 21, 2013. His mother had called the police to request help keeping her son safe during a mental health episode.
Over the past 40 years, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), an independent government agency, has held numerous hearings on discrimination in border towns surrounding reservations: in New Mexico, near the Navajo reservation; in South Dakota, near the Sioux reservations; and, just this August, in Billings, Mont., near the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations.
Incidents aired even in recent hearings sound like tales from the pre-civil-rights Deep South. They ranged from denial of service in public places to police brutality to the failure to investigate murders. In Northern Plains states, USCCR members personally observed staff in restaurants and stores hassling or refusing to serve Natives. In South Dakota, the commission heard testimony about a police department that found reasons to fine Natives hundreds of dollars, then “allowed” them to work off the debt on a ranch. USCCR Rocky Mountain director Malee Craft described the situation as “slave labor.”
This is the context for Native deaths at the hands of police.
The high rate of these killings is also a result of the comparative dearth of mental healthcare services for Native Americans, says Bonnie Duran, an Opelousas/Coushatta tribe descendent and an associate professor in the University of Washington School of Social Work. People threatening suicide and experiencing other mental health crises made up one-quarter of all those killed by cops in the first half of 2016, according to data collected by the Washington Post; they made up nearly half of the Native deaths examined by the Claremont researchers.
Distraught people in these situations—such as Riley or Castaway—can be particularly vulnerable. Commands from multiple officers in a quickly developing situation can be very difficult to parse, even for someone who isn’t in crisis, says Jim Trainum, a former Washington, D.C., homicide detective.
“Attending to conflicting signals from multiple sources results in a huge cognitive demand,” says Melissa Russano, a psychologist and criminal justice professor at Roger Williams University. “Split-second responses are required of the individual. You have to assess if and to what extent there is a threat, and that may create a certain level of panic.”
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