Paula added that her daughter “had a motherly nature about her.” “She promoted peace,” she said. “That is something that I want to always be remembered.”
Just hours after the shooting took place, CDP released a portion of the bodycam footage from the incident. Explaining why the footage was released so quickly, interim police chief Michael Woods cited “the public’s need, desire and expectation to have transparency” in a press conference.
The rest of the footage will reportedly be released after undergoing standard censoring to blur out the faces of minors involved in the incident.
Franklin County, where the shooting occurred, has one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in both the state of Ohio and the broader U.S., according to the Dispatch. Among the 100 most populous counties nationally, the county ranks 18th in the average annual fatality rate. In Ohio alone, Franklin accounts for 33% of Black individuals shot by law enforcement.
Across the country, there were just 18 days in 2020 on which police did not kill someone, according to a recent report from Insider. Of the victims of these killings, nearly a third (28%) were Black.
These are patterns that are replicated year after year. According to the project Mapping Police Violence, police have killed 319 people in 2021 so far. The organization’s data also points to a lack of accountability in incidents of police violence: From 2013 to 2020, officers were not charged with a crime in 98.3% of police killings.
While the guilty verdict in Chauvin’s case gave civil rights advocates cause to hope for greater institutional accountability in cases of police violence, many pointed to Bryant’s killing as evidence that one conviction is not enough. In order to prevent further police violence, advocacy groups say that law enforcement agencies must implement fundamental systemic changes.
“This verdict does not change what many of us know to be true: A racist, anti-Black, unjust system can never deliver justice for our people,” said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), on Tuesday. “And it never kept us safe, as it was not designed to.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for them.’s weekly newsletter here.
