Easter Leafa was sitting under a blanket on her balcony with a knife when Anchorage police arrived, responding to a call for help from her family. Instead of showing her hands as told, they said, the 16-year-old girl stood and approached them with the blade.
Two officers opened fire simultaneously, one with a less-lethal foam projectile and the other with real bullets, killing her two days before Leafa was to start her junior year of high school. She had recently moved from American Samoa to get a better education and was still learning English, her family said.
Leafa was among seven people shot by Anchorage police since May, the most recent a homicide suspect critically injured after officers said he opened fire on them Friday afternoon. That is more than twice as many as the department typically shoots in a year. Four of the subjects were killed.
The spate has made Anchorage the latest in a long list of American cities to wrestle with how police use force and prompted an apology to Leafa’s family along with promises of reform from the city’s new mayor.
“This cannot be our new normal,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance told a news conference after Leafa’s death.
No, I understand that. She was also a non-native English speaker, who was still learning English.
The first part of my original comment was specifically addressing someone else’s comment who was incorrectly comparing apples to cantaloupes.
I said nothing to do about what the cops felt, or even their actions, which I addressed in the second half, but no one has responded to that so it was dropped.
I was simply stating that those are not apt comparisons because of the statistically significant physical differences between those two groups of people.
There’s a reason why Pacific islanders, specifically Samoans, are 40 times more likely to be in the NFL than any other group.
None of that justifies the police killing her, but it also invalidates the original comparison, which was all I was critiquing.