Widespread protests continue over killing of Stephon Clark. Source: ABC
I'm walking through New York's Times Square in the evening and notice that the steps usually packed with tourists snapping selfies of the famous neon lights are deserted.
At the foot of the stairs, illuminated by signs advertising Google and Jesus Christ Superstar, a group of protesters wearing "F*** the police" shirts are shouting at weary-looking officers.
In Chicago, demonstrators gathered at the Trump International Hotel yesterday waved placards and screamed in anger. And at the nexus of this fury in Sacramento, California, 200 demonstrators in black masks faced down riot police on Saturday, in one of a string of protests over the appalling shooting that took place in the city a fortnight ago.
Vision from the police helicopter shows Clark on the ground with two police officers still hiding around around a corner with guns raised.
But the White House has called their grief a "local issue", and this shameful story has had precious little airing in news outlets around the world.
That's because the death of Stephon Clark, shot six times in the back and twice in the leg in his grandparents' back yard on March 18, is just another name to add to a long line of unarmed black men killed by police.
Officers investigating a vandalism complaint appeared in the darkness and shouted at Clark, then fired 20 bullets at the 22-year-old father of two, before he was able to respond. Footage shows that for five minutes after that, none of them approached the lifeless man or offered assistance, instead shouting at him to show his hands, before walking over and handcuffing his body.
They then muted the audio on their cameras.
Sequita Thompson breaks into tears while talking about the fatal police shooting of her grandsson Stephon Clark. Photo / Getty
His grandmother Sequita Clark said she was watching a video of her granddaughter dancing when she heard a "boom boom boom". She crawled to where the 7-year-old was sleeping on the couch, pulled her to the floor, then crawled to her husband and told him to call 911.
"They didn't have to kill him like that, they didn't have to shoot him that many times," she told reporters through sobs.
Stephon Clark's horrified family commissioned their own autopsy by private doctor Bennet Omalu, who said the young dad would have bled profusely after suffering severe damage to his body, including shattered vertebrae, a collapsed lung and an arm broken into "tiny bits", according to the New York Times.
An attendee holds a sign as he joined others at a rally aimed at ensuring the memory of police shooting victim Stephon Clark and calling for police reform on Saturday in Sacramento. Photo / AP
Sacramento police said on Friday they had not viewed the autopsy and that commenting would be "inappropriate" because the investigation was continuing.
But the stand-off is getting more brutal. Dash cam video from a vigil in the Californian capital on Saturday night showed a police officer hitting a 61-year-old woman with his SUV before driving away. Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said afterwards that he hadn't spoken to the deputy, but from the footage, it looked as though he probably hadn't seen her.
"It is not possible that the officer did not see her," said Wanda Cleveland's lawyer Mark Reichel. "It appears from all evidence that he hit her intentionally. He drove away from an injured woman intentionally."
A protester holds a photo of Stephon Clark during a Black Lives Matter demonstration outside of Sacramento City Hall on March 22. Photo / Getty
Writing in the New York Times, columnist Charles Blow said he had tried to come to this police shooting with a fresh perspective, but was "undermined and betrayed by having covered too many".
He said the deaths were like "lancing a boil" in communities treated as expendable, but followed a ritualised pattern, in which "white-hot rage slowly cools into a dispassionate disappointment in a system that, it is revealed, is operating as designed".
"What the police is doing is legal, following a landmark 1989 case in which it was ruled that the use of force must only be 'objectively reasonable', while acknowledging that 'officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving'."
These killings have become too regular to be shocking, as friends and relatives of men including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling and Eric Garner will attest. The muted coverage of Stephon Clark's death underscores this fact.
Last weekend's March For Our Lives in Washington DC was a protest of unprecedented size in which high school students begged the President to do something about gun control at a federal level.
Steven Ash holds drawing of police shooting victim Stephon Clark, as he waits to enter the Bayside of South Sacramento Church for Clark's on March 29. Photo / AP
Donald Trump spent the day at his golf club in Florida and did not make a direct comment, although White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said that "keeping children safe was a top priority of the President's". She noted that he was pushing through a ban on bump stocks, although these were not used in the Parkland shooting that triggered the march.
Similarly, measures introduced to reduce police violence, including body cameras and special training, are not having the desired effect.
Police muted their body cameras after Clark's shooting as they discussed what happened.
Daniel Hahn, Sacramento's first African-American police chief, is the man tasked with the almost impossible challenge of quelling the tensions between the black community and the Force.
His own early encounters with police included witnessing a murder as a child and being accused of assaulting an officer as a teenager.
Dr Bennet Omalu stands by a diagram showing the results of his autopsy of Stephon Clark during a news conference at the Southside Christian Center on March 30. Photo / Getty
Hahn said the policy allowing officers to mute their microphones "bred mistrust", noting that they are only supposed to mute the audio for personal conversations or confidential communications such as talks with informants.
Police said they feared Clark had a handgun when they confronted him while hunting a suspect who had been breaking windows in the neighbourhood — but he only had an iPhone. They claimed he was moving towards them in a threatening way, although the family's autopsy found that no bullets struck the front of his body.
"They gunned him down like a dog," Clark's brother Stevante told the Guardian. "They executed him. Twenty times. That's like stepping on a roach. And then stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping, stepping."
Police fired 20 bullets at the unarmed 22-year-old, pictured with his niece hours before his death in Sacramento, California.
An attendee for the wake of police shooting victim Stephon Clark carries a drawing of Clark to the Bayside of South Sacramento Church on March 28, 2018. Photo / AP
Stevante Clark is now trying to raise money on GoFundMe for community centres helping reduce the barrier between police and the black community, in his brother's name. "The main problem is that black people and police officers fear each other's capabilities to hurt or kill one another," he said, "And at the end of the day everyone wants to go home to their family."
Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg was slammed for saying he could not "second-guess" the officers, before confessing the video made him feel "really sick" and the outcome was "wrong".
Closer to home, Australia had its own brush with police shooting when Aussie Justine Damond was gunned down in Minnesota after she called emergency services to report a possible sexual assault behind her home.
One of the two officers who attended the scene said the pair feared for their lives when a shadowy figure approached the police car from behind and they heard a thumping noise on the back of their car. That's when his partner shot the 40-year-old life coach.
With African-Americans, the fear is even more visceral thanks to society-wide racial stereotypes. Police are trained to be ready to respond with deadly fire before they are killed, and are rarely convicted for doing so.
That's why we have heard so little about Stephon Clark, and no doubt the others that will come after him.
