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Native Americans are killed by police at a rate higher 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 Rileyhomeless, 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 Rileyone 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...