Police deactivate Korryn Gaines' Facebook uploads before killing her
August 4, 2016 8:13 AM   Subscribe

Police came to Gaines’ house with an arrest warrant for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, charges related to a traffic stop on March 10... During the ensuing negotiation with Gaines, she used Facebook to broadcast the standoff. Police say they deactivated, but did not delete, her account after contacting Facebook “in order to preserve the integrity of the negotiation process.” At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her. (Guardian)

Though Baltimore County has implemented a body camera program, it is only a few weeks into implementation and according to police none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras.

Around 3pm, according to Johnson, Gaines “brought the weapon up to the ready position, announced to one or more of the tactical team personnel: ‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you.’”

Instead of leaving, an officer fired, and Gaines returned the fire. “Our personnel returned three rounds of fire, striking her and killing her,” said Johnson.


Korryn Gaines Is the Ninth Black Woman Shot and Killed by Police in the U.S. This Year
(Slate)
posted by splitpeasoup (6 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: This is truly awful, but also is one of those cases where a truly awful real phenomenon intersects with weird circumstances of the particular example case, in a way that often makes threads on a particular case go really badly here. -- LobsterMitten



 
Christ.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:15 AM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's troubling that one avenue for documenting police/civilian interactions isn't as safe as would be hoped.

It's also troubling that people on the internet are terrible, and probably would have egged her on.

It's mostly troubling that this young woman died.

I don't know what constructive things I can say here. Damn.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:16 AM on August 4, 2016


This is a really tough case which illustrates how systemic injustice and bad policing decisions can produce a moment in which the actual shooting was (probably) justified and yet (most likely) needless. Bring up a mentally unstable young woman in a hostile environment where some degree of paranoia about the police is justified, send cops to a house to serve arrest warrants for misdemeanor charges, and then not be willing to wait out a woman with a five-year-old child, and you get people dead and children deprived of their mother forever.
posted by praemunire at 8:25 AM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


(Oh, and the police have said, at least, that people on Facebook were urging her to fight. If that's the case--and I recognize it could be a lie, and it's also potentially a lie in future cases--I just can't blame them for asking Facebook to shut it down, or Facebook for complying.)
posted by praemunire at 8:26 AM on August 4, 2016


So, none of the officers were wearing body cameras, and they involved Facebook to prevent the victim from broadcasting the incident publicly, and then killed her. If there was nothing going on that wasn't kosher during the negotiation, then the broadcast would actually have helped the police's case--but instead it just looks like, "We planned to kill her, so we made sure there weren't any witnesses first."
posted by Autumnheart at 8:27 AM on August 4, 2016


Other people have said it better, but it's amazing how well police work with the internet when it's not a woman being harassed.
posted by Etrigan at 8:29 AM on August 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


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