Justine Damond's death is a tragedy – as every police killing in America is | Steven W Thrasher | Opinion

Justine Damond's death is a tragedy â€" as every police killing in America is | Steven W Thrasher | Opinion

We must not look at the shooting death of a white woman by a black male police officer (both who seem to have been immigrants) and think to ourselves that somehow this tragedy is worse than the thousands of police shootings the nation has had to confront since Eric Garner was killed three years ago this week and Michael Brown was killed three years ago next month.

Police killings are not unusual in the US. They happen almost every day â€" on average about three times a day. Instances of people calling 911 to ask for help, only to have the cops show up and shoot them instead, are also not unusual. Just ask Charleena Lyles. (Actually, you can’t ... because police shot the pregnant woman dead when she called for help.)

And so the shooting death of Justine Damond is a tragedy, but it’s not more or less important than any of the other tragedies â€" even though it may evoke global sympathy in a way the killings of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile by police in Minneapolis did not.

It would be easy for the narrative to become “Wow, even a white woman can’t approach a police car without getting shot”, but nobody should be killed by police in this manner. We should seize this moment to rethink the assumed ubiquity of police violence in our society.

Damond lived and died in Minneapolis and was friends with an academic colleague of mine, Letta Page, an editor of the sociology journal, Contexts. “There are a lot of us who have learned a lot about race and police in this country, and we don’t want to take away from the bigger narratives,” Page told me the day after attending a vigil for Damond, whom she met at a fitness studio.

“Justine would be as livid as anyone, by the way, at the fact that blonde, white lady victim narratives are such a different thing from black, male victim narratives. She’d also give the side-eye to the fact that, if she had more melanin, the news stories would be using ‘immigrant’ or ‘foreign national’ in their descriptions of her,” Page said.

“I feel like she’d be the first to have said, ‘Yeah, I’m lucky enough to be a white immigrant,” Page said, adding, “And I think it’s a complicating thing for her close friends, because we want to mourn her and not take away that she’s a real outlier in the problem of police violence.”

After news of her death began to spread, close friends, media and Black Lives Matter activists gathered the next day near where she was shot. (In my experience, Black Lives Matter activists always show up at these kinds of vigils, even when the victim isn’t black.)

“I heard snippets of conversations saying, ‘I’d be scared to call the police now,’ as if it had never occurred to them that calling the police could be a dangerous act on its own,” Page said. She also sensed that “some might be wondering ‘Why are Black Lives Matter people here?’ People may not see the natural connection” between ... the death of a middle-class white woman and of Charleena Lyles, Korryn Gaines and Rekia Boyd.

“From the scant details of what actually happened, I suspect we will hear that it was a ‘tragic accident’, and this won’t be considered a case that fits in with Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, and we have to push back against that,” Page said. Yet despite mourning someone she will miss terribly on a personal level, Page also talked of the bigger picture. “I think we really have to ask the same questions about Philando’s death. Why was a gun pulled at a traffic stop?” Similarly, “why was a gun pulled out and apparently cocked” as Damond spoke to police?

“These questions are the same,” Page said, even though systemic racism makes black people bear their answer more often. She is worried that in the case of her friend, “we’re going to hear about this being a tragic accident. But a death at the hands of police isn’t an accident. It’s part of a much bigger problem of over-policing and overuse of force”.

Damond texted Page on Friday night trying to get her and her husband to go to something called “Dance Church” (they laughingly declined). Damond practiced mind and body healing, and talked with Page “about racial disparities and social stuff quite a bit. It was a part of why she believed in meditation and self-care and coaching as she did. It was in service of learning how to live lightly in the world”.

“I think she’d be OK with the death part,” of leaving the world, Page said. “That’s part of the life cycle of the universe. She might even feel OK if this is what it took to get one of the richest, whitest neighborhoods in the city to get involved” in the cause for justice, “because maybe they didn’t feel they have a personal stake in it before â€" but better late than never. I think she could be OK with that.”

Damond’s death â€" as Trayvon’s and Rekia’s and and Sandra’s and so many others have before â€" offers us the chance to address the violence of policing head on, and the ways policing disproportionately affects poor and nonwhite people but can harm anyone.

Policing is the means by which an unequal social order is violently kept in place. Let’s run with this â€" not by elevating Damond as an exceptionally innocent victim, but by honoring her right alongside all the people mowed down by police day in and day out.

• This article was amended on 19 July 2017 to correct the average number of police killings in the US per day

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