No
one knows what caused Elwood Edwards White to snap. In the afternoon of
Sunday, May 20, 2012, the 22-year-old black man walked into the middle
of a busy intersection in Oceanside, California, carrying a cinderblock,
the pockets of his gray gym shorts filled with rocks.
During the next seven minutes, according to testimony that later came
out in court, he heaved the cinderblock through a truck window —
injuring a female passenger — ransacked a nearby AM/PM market and hurled
a beer bottle at an onlooker. When he started throwing rocks at cars,
two Marines tried to subdue him. To fend them off, White grabbed a push
broom from the back of a nearby maintenance truck and hit one of the men
on the leg, causing the broom’s head to break off.
Witnesses reported hearing White yelling, repeatedly, “In the name of
Jesus Christ” and “Help me.” They described his behavior as “bizarre”
and “crazy.” Police dispatchers alerted officers to an assault with a
deadly weapon — the cinderblock — but also warned that this was a
potential 5150 call, the code for someone who’s mentally ill and poses a
danger to himself or others.
When police arrived, White was standing on a sidewalk and hitting a
parked van with the jagged end of the broom handle. Five officers
surrounded him — four with guns drawn, one with a police dog — yelling
at him to drop the stick. He didn’t. Less than a minute later, at 1:30
p.m., White lay dying on a patch of dirt from a gunshot wound to the
chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The scene where Elwood White was shot to death by police, Oceanside, California, May 20, 2012.
Photo: Kelly Davis
Michael Astorga, the San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who shot
White, told investigators that he was holding the stick “like a spear”
and had lunged at another officer. But no witnesses, including the four
other officers, corroborated this account fully. Neither did the
forensic evidence. This past June, during proceedings in a federal
wrongful-death lawsuit filed by White’s parents, a county medical
examiner testified that the bullet’s path — through White’s right
forearm and into his chest — showed he was gripping the stick like a
baseball bat when he was shot, holding it close to his torso, the thumb
of his right hand facing up and turned inward. The four other officers
said they saw White step forward, but the stick remained vertical.
There were no attempts to use less-lethal force. The police dog
wasn’t released because, his handler testified, he didn’t want the dog
to get hurt — even though the dog had been trained to disarm suspects.
The dog’s handler called out “less lethal” and “we need a beanbag” to
Astorga, who had a beanbag rifle in the trunk of his car, but Astorga
didn’t retrieve it. Astorga testified that he’d at first drawn his
Taser, but decided against using it because it was too windy. The
National Weather Service, though, showed the wind that day blowing at
just 4 mph, according to evidence presented at trial.
Jamon Hicks, an attorney for the Whites, argued that the officers’
actions went against recommended protocol for dealing with someone in
crisis. “What’s the rush? Back up. Use your resources,” Hicks said. “I
don’t care if you say ‘Drop the stick’ 100 times — you save that man’s
life. There were other options that they had, but they didn’t even try.”
Hicks and co-counsel Carl Douglas never argued that White didn’t pose
a threat to public safety. The question was whether, at the moment
Astorga fired his gun, White posed such a threat that deadly force was
the only option. To prevail in the case, the defense had to convince the
jury to ignore the forensic evidence, ignore the witness testimony and
believe Astorga’s version of events. “I just think fear permeated the
courtroom and the jury box,” Hicks told this reporter recently. During
closing arguments, a county attorney hoisted the stick in his right
hand, held it above his shoulder — as one would hold a spear — and
stepped toward jurors with a loud, aggressive stomp.
On June 22 the jury — all white except for one Latina woman — deliberated for an hour before finding the shooting justified.
OVER THE PAST YEAR, news reports
of police shootings have highlighted the fact that we simply don’t know
how many people are killed each year by law enforcement — or why. How
many are armed? With what? How many are black? Hispanic? How many are
mentally ill? How many are, like Elwood White, black
and seemingly mentally ill?
Elwood (bottom left) with his father, Tim (top middle); his mother, Darleen (top, second from right); and his siblings.
Photo: Courtesy of the White family
“There
is no good data on the use of lethal force, period, much less the use
of lethal force where mental illness is a factor, even much less the
same involving mental illness and racial or ethnic groups,” said Doris
Fuller, chief of research and public affairs for the Treatment Advocacy
Center, which
released a 2013 report urging better data collection on mentally ill people killed by law enforcement.
California is close to requiring such data collection. A proposed
bill authored by State Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez requires all law
enforcement agencies to report any shooting or use of force in which a
civilian or police officer is injured or killed. The reports must
include not only basic demographic information — gender, race, age — and
what type of weapons were involved but also whether there were any
perceived “behavior or mental disorders.” The bill requires the state
Department of Justice to compile this information into an annual report.
“We wanted to get a really clear picture of what was happening in the
community with police officers and use of force,” said Francisco
Estrada, Rodriguez’s spokesperson, “and what we can do to minimize the
use of force on citizens and police officers.”
Another proposed bill aims to target racial profiling by collecting
and analyzing data on the race and ethnicity of anyone even stopped by
police. “People of color are getting murdered across the nation, and
local data as well as anecdotal information suggests that the impact on
African-Americans is disproportionate,” the bill’s author, Assemblywoman
Shirley Weber, told
The Intercept. “At this point, we need to
have data that explains why a person is stopped in the first place and
what justification police officers have to use force on an individual.”
Having such data, Weber said, “will give us the ability to move the
discussion from anecdotes, rhetoric and accusation to a more rational
and factual dialogue about appropriate law enforcement tactics and
strategies.”
In the absence of official tallies, earlier this year the
Washington Post began tracking police shootings in the U.S., using media reports and other public records, to compile an
online database. As of Aug. 23, according to the
Post’s
count, law enforcement had killed 626 people. While the majority were
armed with deadly weapons — guns or knives — of those killed blacks and
Hispanics were two-and-a-half times more likely to be unarmed than
whites. (The
Post’s reporting team categorized as “unarmed” a
black man holding a broom handle because, they wrote, it’s “an object
unlikely to inflict serious injury.”)
Roughly a quarter of the deaths the
Post has tracked
involved someone who, according to police or family members, was
mentally ill. Here, again, unarmed blacks and Hispanics are
overrepresented: Black mentally ill decedents were 11 times more likely
to be unarmed than whites. Hispanic mentally ill decedents were five
times more likely to be unarmed than whites.
While the analysis is far from scientific, “it raises an interesting
question,” said Phillip Goff, president for the Center for Policing
Equity at UCLA, “namely, the threshold at which black versus white
mentally ill people become ‘life-threatening.’”
In the absence of good data, we’re left with what research tells us
about policing and race and policing and mental illness. Experts say no
research exists that examines the overlay of race and mental illness in
confrontations with law enforcement.
Research shows that the less experience an officer has in dealing
with someone who’s mentally ill, the more likely the officer is to view
that person as a threat. Training in this area tends to be minimal, with
most officers getting no more than eight hours of academy training,
according to
a recent survey
conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum. At Elwood White’s
wrongful death trial, Astorga testified that his training was limited to
eight hours. The sheriff’s deputy whom White purportedly lunged at, who
had his gun drawn but didn’t shoot, had participated in 24 hours of
voluntary post-academy training in handling psychiatric emergencies.
That officer said in a deposition that though he was pressing the
trigger of his gun, he had “no intention” of shooting White.
In the same way experts believe that “black crime implicit bias” has
led to a disproportionate number of black people being killed by police,
so too might that bias lead some people to view certain groups as more
dangerous, said Lorie Fridell, an associate professor in the Department
of Criminology at the University of South Florida, who’s considered a
top expert on the subject. “This can occur even in those individuals who
reject stereotypes and prejudice.”
This means that a 22-year-old black male who’s throwing rocks at
cars, ransacking a minimart and wielding a broken broom handle will
likely be perceived as more dangerous than a 45-year-old white woman
engaging in the same behavior, said Seth Stoughton, a University of
South Carolina law professor and former police officer who studies law
enforcement training and tactics, “not because of conscious racism, but
because of the implicit biases that shape [police] perceptions of that
call or that encounter. At an unconscious level, that officer’s brain
may be telling his mind,
It’s unusual for a
45-year-old white woman to be engaging in this behavior, so unusual that
this is probably a symptom of mental illness. At the same time, the officer’s brain may be telling his mind, at an unconscious level,
This seems like violent crime that young black adults have committed in the past that I, as an officer, am familiar with, so it’s probably that.”
The biggest factor in an officer’s decision to use force is the
amount of resistance coming from a suspect, Stoughton said, and
confusion could be interpreted as resistance. “Confrontational tactics,
such as boxing a suspect in or making direct eye contact, can actually
get officers into a lot of trouble when dealing with a person in crisis,
as opposed to a criminal suspect,” he said.
ELWOOD WHITE WAS a long way from
home when he died. He lived with his parents in Newhall, a small town
just north of Los Angeles. On May 19, he’d taken a bus to Oceanside, 120
miles away in San Diego County, to spend the week with a longtime
friend while his parents attended his sister’s college graduation in
Texas. The friend told police investigators that as soon as he picked up
White at the bus station, he could tell something wasn’t right.
The next afternoon, at the friend’s aunt’s house, White ran outside,
started filling his pockets with rocks and began walking in circles and
talking to himself. When the friend went to check on White, White
punched him and took off running down the street, yelling, “It wasn’t
me! Help me! Help me.” The intersection where White ended up is about a
mile from the aunt’s house.
White’s parents still don’t know what was wrong with their son, but
they believe he experienced some sort of psychotic break. He’d never
been formally diagnosed with a mental illness, but just weeks before his
death, he’d told his dad, Tim, that he was hearing voices. “My husband
told Elwood that whenever he heard the voices, to just come and be with
him,” his mom, Darleen, said.
White’s parents reject any suggestion that their son intentionally
went on a rampage. He’d never been in trouble before; he’d never shown
any violent tendencies. At the time of his death, he was a hospice
worker, a Golden Gloves boxer who’d started a youth boxing program and a
member of 818 Session,
an underground “krumping” (street dance) group in North Hollywood. He
was from a large, close family. (His dad and uncle, Lonnie White, were
USC football stars.) The third of seven kids, White was the only one who
hadn’t gone to college, a fact the defense zeroed in on during the
trial. Darleen said her son planned to start community college in the
fall of 2012.
White’s parents were so troubled by what police say their son did
that they asked the coroner if he could examine White’s brain for any
sign of what might have triggered his behavior. (This autopsy showed no
signs of brain trauma or abnormality, although it would not necessarily
reveal other forms of mental illness.)
The Whites don’t plan to appeal the jury verdict. But at least the
trial helped them better understand what happened that day, Darleen
said. “We finally have the answers we were seeking,” she wrote on a
Facebook page set up in her son’s memory.
“Police testimony, in my opinion, proved that the situation was not handled properly,” she told
The Intercept. “My son should still be alive.”
Photo: Elwood and his sister Taahirah in 2011.
![Parke, left, was conducting an interview about tourism on Bridgewater Plaza in Franklin County before her and Ward were killed [WDBJ7]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ugUkn471OMII0Mr6r1cifDksUU2zxDMphG5epdcODcqb0Uf5w2x0rmtSch63bIGupVhj7Tgi_GlcNKF2ZrlDanlxEI6qJZEIMmLQcS9j40pAsVnvodPVuFe2EXiDotl1yZc2rjc26MExKYk0Q10L2oAw6DrR-P3RSB6d1Vpm9ug0MuH_Da0pWqlD2G7COn9L4w-RL2BjhsQVB-Csc=s0-d "US reporter and cameraman shot dead during live report")
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