The Cops Killed With Impunity. Then Came a ‘Perfect Victim.’
The police killing of Hunter Brittain brought Al Sharpton to rural Arkansas. It also has people of color asking why a white teen had to die for people to ask questions.
It was 3 a.m. on a dark stretch of rural highway, and 17-year-old Hunter Brittain and his cousin were test-driving the pickup truck they’d been tinkering with at a local repair shop all night. Brittain, a white teen from the tiny city of McRae, Arkansas, who dreamed of being a Nascar driver, worked all year to buy the old white GMC truck. But the transmission was a persistent problem.
The late-night spin was meant to see if his efforts to fix it had paid off. But according to an account from Michael Davis, a sergeant with the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office, the car rattled and had smoke pouring from it when he encountered it on the highway and attempted to pull it over. Robert Newcomb, Davis’ attorney, told The Daily Beast his client thought the car might’ve been stolen and damaged in the process. Davis flashed his lights.
Within seconds, Brittain would be shot and killed. And like so many police shootings in the United States, the accounts about what happened in those critical moments differ wildly.
Brittain’s uncle, Jesse Brittain, told The Daily Beast that after being stopped, his nephew got out of the truck, but only to get a jug of antifreeze he kept in the bed to place it behind the tires. The teen had trouble shifting the truck into park, and the vehicle often slipped backward, he said. Brittain explained that Jordan King, Hunter’s 16-year-old cousin who was in the car that night, told the family that no orders from Davis were ever given to Hunter about what to do in those key moments. Instead, Brittain was shot by Davis while he reached for the antifreeze, according to the slain teen’s family. He was unarmed and no guns were recovered from the scene.
“He never made it to the back tire,” Jesse Brittain told The Daily Beast. “He never was told to halt or stop or get on the ground or nothing.”
Davis wore a body camera, but it was turned off during the encounter, because, Newcomb said, it required two buttons to turn on and Davis didn’t get it going in the heat of the moment. “The camera just didn’t catch,” he said. “It was not a conscious decision on his part not to comply with policy.”
Newcomb said Davis yelled at Brittain to put his hands out the window when the car stopped, and feared the worst when it lurched backward and Brittain hopped out. “You got a vehicle moving, you got somebody reaching in the back of the truck to try and grab something,” he said. “If the young man had just stayed in the car like he was told to, or showed his hands like he was told to, or even told the officer, ‘My truck won’t stop, I have to block the wheels’—any number of things and he’d be alive today.”
Brittain was taken to a hospital in North Little Rock after the shooting and later died, according to a statement from the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office. Davis was fired for breaking his employer’s body-camera policy. A special prosecutor is currently reviewing case details to determine possible criminal charges against Davis.
Nearly 100 people have been shot and killed by Arkansas police since 2015, according to a Washington Post database. More than half have been white in a state that is about 80 percent white, while a third have been Black, despite Black people making up less than 16 percent of the population. While there have been police shootings and deaths in custody that have attracted the occasional national news item, many residents who spoke to The Daily Beast said the shooting of Brittain has turned attention to the issue in the state unlike ever before.
It has also transformed many white, rural citizens who they say are normally silent about police violence into overnight advocates. It’s a shift that is both frustrating and potentially useful to their cause, one they can’t help but fear will lose its luster when a so-called perfect victim fades from the limelight.
“We see communities right now that aren’t normally vocal at all when it comes to someone being killed by the cops. They’re actually very silent. And now we see this beast awakening,” said Kwami Abdul-Bey, the political chair of the Jacksonville, Arkansas, NAACP, noting persistent protests by mostly white gatherers that have been ongoing at the Lonoke County Sheriff’s Office. “Now we have a bunch of white, middle class, Trump-supporters and MAGA followers who have come to the same conclusion that we have already been at, which is that police violence must stop.”
Bey is among a handful of local and national Black civil rights leaders who have gathered in support of Brittain’s family. They include mega-attorney Benjamin Crump—who usually represents people of color and is representing the white teen’s family—and Al Sharpton, who spoke at Brittain’s packed memorial this month. Crump has explicitly said the white, unarmed teen’s is “one of the most significant cases” of police violence that could be used to create a multicultural coalition to push for police reform in the notoriously Republican state.
And maybe even the whole country.
“That is going to be looked at differently because he wasn’t a teenager who was a child of color,” he told CNN recently. “Because we’ve always said that our white brothers and sisters couldn’t fathom their child being killed by the police. That people are supposed to protect them. But that’s a reality that parents of children of color literally deal with every day of their lives.”
Despite all the high rhetoric about the possibilities of working together, other Black community leaders and families in the state who have lost loved ones to police violence are not so optimistic. They wonder if all the attention on the issues they’ve been marching and protesting about for years will result in real change—or if the same level of goodwill shown toward Brittain will be shown toward the next victim of police violence who looks like them.
“Hunter is a good person to point at and say that the police had no right to shoot him,” Hadiyah Cummings told The Daily Beast.
An activist from Conway, Arkansas, Cummings has protested deaths of Black men by the police that she said never received any attention, due, in part, to the victims having a history of drug use or prior criminal convictions. “You shouldn’t have to be a perfect victim to not be killed by police,” she said.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/hunter-brittain-in-arkansas-is-the-perfect-police-killing-victim?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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