Never Call the Cops for Help
You’re never too old to be killed by an interaction with a police officer in the United States: though the Guardian’s analysis of every police killing in 2015 to date found that the average age of people killed by police is 37, some 20 people killed this year have been in their 60s, seven in their 70s, and two in their 80s – about six elderly people a month.
The circumstances behind the killing of elder citizens by police mirror the many reasons why Americans of all ages (some 473 in total this year as of the time this was published) are killed by police.
But police encounters with the elderly which turn deadly are largely triggered by three things: vehicular slaughter; episodes of extreme violence – sometimes with the victim possibly intending to die as a result of the encounter; and “welfare checks”, when police are called to check up on an elderly person, which often happens to people with dementia.
A lot of these deaths involve cars. The oldest person slain in 2015 was 87-year-old Louis Becker: a former police chief himself, Becker was killed when his truck collided with a New York State police trooper’s vehicle. Hue Dang, a 64-year-old woman in New Jersey, was struck and killed by a Hackensack police detective’s car; there were no witnesses. Bernard Moore, a 62-year-old black man crossing the street to get to where he worked, was struck by a police car which a witness said was speeding; its lights and sirens were off and the driver was not responding to a call according to footage from a gas station security video. Jeffrey Surnow, a 63-year-old white Michigan man on vacation in Hawaii, was struck by a cop car while biking. Dean Bucheit, a 64-year-old white man in Los Angeles, and Howard Robbins, a 69-year-old white man in Kentucky, were both struck on roads by cops at night.
Elderly people aren’t strictly killed in accidents. Robert Francis Mesch, a white 61-year-old Austin man whose wife called cops saying he was suicidal, allegedly assaulted his wife, fled, led police on a car chase, pointed a gun at them and was shot. Richard Weaver, an 83-year-old white man whom neighbors described as schizophrenic, was shot by police in Oklahoma who said he was wielding a machete. Donald Hicks, a 61-year-old white man, was tasered and then shot after cops said he failed to drop his gun; Richard White, a 63-year-old black man, was shot after cops said he was going through Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans with six molotov cocktails. Jimmy Foreman, 71, was shot after after killing his stepson.
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