Killings by cops are much more common in Western states
Arrest-related death rates are highest in New Mexico, with Nevada and Oregon close behind.
As darkness and a chill fell over northwestern New Mexico on a Friday in late November, two men flagged down a San Juan County Sheriff’s Deputy to report a scuffle, with at least one firearm involved. The altercation was going down in Spencerville, an ad-hoc collection of homes, beat up cars, and dust, that lies just off the highway that links up the towns of Aztec and Farmington. As the deputies responded, they heard gunshots, and called for backup. Three more deputies arrived, along with a New Mexico State trooper.
As the five deputies approached the area from which the shots came, the trooper flanked off to one side, armed with an AR-15. He saw a “silhouette of a person raising a weapon,” according to a court document, and fired two shots. When a male voice screamed that the trooper had missed, he ran to another location, took aim and fired two more shots. The “silhouette,” a 27-year-old Navajo man named Myles Roughsurface, fell to the ground, dead.
Roughsurface was the third person killed at the hands of law enforcement officers in San Juan County this year, and the tenth in New Mexico. As of early December, the cop-related death toll for 11 Western states was at least 181, based on a Wikipedia survey of media reports. National attention has, of late, been on the police killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner in Missouri, Ohio and New York, respectively. But when it comes to the rate of police-related killings per capita, the West is the worst.
The statistics on such things are notoriously incomplete, depending upon individual law enforcement agencies to report the numbers. And the numbers, of course, don’t reveal the circumstances of the death; whether a cop fired out of self-defense or to save the life of an innocent, or whether he acted with excessive force without adequate justification. But regardless of which set of stats one uses, this is clear: Westerners are almost twice as likely as Americans as a whole to suffer from “arrest-related death,” as the Department of Justice terms it, or fatal injury due to “legal intervention,” per the nomenclature of the Centers for Disease Control.
From 2004 to 2010, Americans died from legal intervention — which includes not only homicide, but also dying in custody from accidental causes or suicide — at a rate of .13 per 100,000 people. During that same period of time, legal intervention killed Westerners at a rate of .23 per 100,000. New Mexico cops used lethal force at a higher rate than those in any other state, Oregon and Nevada were close behind, and every other Western state had a rate higher than the U.S. average. As was the case in the U.S. as a whole, African-Americans were the most likely to be killed by cops in the West over that particular period, followed closely by Native Americans, Hispanics and, finally, non-Hispanic whites; during other periods of time, Native Americans are victimized at the highest rate. Three Navajos were killed over a period of just six months in late 2008 and early 2009; one of the victims was killed by the same trooper who shot Roughsurface last month.
Mostly, the killings go down without getting wide media or public notice. But this spring, Albuquerque Police Department officers shot and killed a homeless man, James Boyd, who was armed with a small knife. The killing was caught on video, drawing national attention to the APD’s history of using excessive force, and inspiring protests. Just a month later, the Justice Department released its report — in the works since 2012 — on the department, finding that the “APD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.” Since 2010, according to a KRQE News analysis, APD officers have shot and killed at a rate of four per 100,000 people, which is more than 30 times the national rate.
Utah garnered unwanted national attention, as well, after officers from the Saratoga Springs police department responded to a report of a man with a samurai-style sword acting suspiciously outside a Panda Express restaurant. After 22-year-old Darrien Hunt, who was black, allegedly lunged at the officers, he was shot dead.
The heartbreaking stories do little to hint at the reasons for what appears to be a Western epidemic. Yet correlations with other stats hint at directions to be explored. Western states, for example, have a much higher suicide rate than other states, a possible indicator that mental illness that goes untreated is more prevalent here. Oftentimes, the victims of police shootings are exhibiting signs of mental illness when they’re shot; one of the victims in San Juan County, after behaving erratically and while fighting with police, slashed his own throat just before an officer shot him in the head.
There’s also a loose correlation in the West between police-related shooting rates and economic health. New Mexico, for example, leads the nation in arrest-related deaths, and also has among the highest rates of poverty and income inequality. That can create an environment of desperation, leading to more crime, which leads to more confrontations between police and the citizenry.
The heartbreaking stories do little to hint at the reasons for what appears to be a Western epidemic.
And then there’s the West’s gun-loving culture and high rates of firearm ownership and firearm-related killings. Gun rights advocates argue that the ubiquity of guns deters crime, because a criminal never knows which average Joe might whip out a pistol and blow the would-be criminal away. That same wariness must extend to police officers: If they’re in a region where guns are everywhere, then when a suspect reaches for something in his pocket, it’s reasonable to suspect that it might be a gun, giving a reason for the police officer to shoot first.
Whatever reason we might come up with for this sort of violent tragedy, it’s not likely to soothe the sorrow of the victims’ families and friends — or the trauma felt by a police officer who shoots and kills someone, particularly if by mistake.
About a week after Roughsurface died, I happened to be driving past the area where the shooting took place. I turned up the county road into Spencerville. It’s rough, to put it mildly, a place where poverty lies out in the open like the torn up mattresses and wheel-less cars. But to those who live there, it's home and, presumably, a sort of sanctuary. Dusk was just giving way to dark, and I drove slowly past the humble houses and the single-wides, not sure what I was looking for.
And there, next to a metal fence, a Christmas-themed teddy bear lay in the dirt next to a row of votive candles, some glowing pale. It was here that Roughsurface went from being a living, breathing soul — an intelligent, "easygoing, mellow guy until someone riles him up," his mother told the Farmington Daily Times —to being just a memory, another statistic.
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Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He writes from Durango, Colorado. Homepage photograph of protests of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, by Flickr user Light Brigading. Follow @jonnypeace
