Last week, Salt Lake was marked as yet another city distinctly and publicly affected by the ongoing hurricane of media-fueled police harassment and violence. Police say Abdi Mohamed, the victim of the shooting, and one other person were hitting a man with sticks when cops ordered them to stop. The other man complied quickly, but Mohamed did not and was promptly shot four times by officers.
After reading the details in the first news release, I naturally became outraged. In our country, recently so full of race-fueled hate and division, I could not help but wonder: How could this happen again? Why does this continue to happen? When will it stop? When will Americans of color finally feel safe enough to stop fearing the authorities? It was only after this drawn-out, internal rant that I decided to take a step back and entertain the idea that I could be assessing the situation from my own biased lens.
Maybe the cops felt that their lives were threatened. That could be it. But what about the fact that Mohamed was only armed with a broomstick, while the police officers were armed with guns? OK, that’s one angle to think about. Then there’s also the fact that Mohamed did not comply immediately when the police confronted him — definitely calls for negative consequences! Alas, but this leads us to realize that, while Mohamed was moving towards his victim — the man he was beating with a broomstick — he was not, in fact, making any threatening attempts on the officers’ lives, which would be the main reason for them to open fire … interesting. I finally settled on the fact that maybe this issue wasn’t surrounding race. Rather, perhaps it is just one more instance to add to the growing pile of trigger-happy-officer v. citizen confrontations.
What struck me the most was not the fact that when I Googled the shooting, the first result that popped up was a Fox news article about the police force summoned to riots following the shooting. A budding suggestion floated across my mind — since moving to Utah, I have felt specifically excluded from these events. Generally, due to the overall lack of diversity in Salt Lake, these issues — race, religion and every other aspect of a person’s life that seems to make the general American public reach for a torch and pitchfork — seemingly fail to reach and/or affect us out here in the mountainous West. Just acknowledging the fact that this confrontation took place in the most diverse part of Utah makes me wonder — what would happen in any other suburb, neighborhood or small town?
Now that those big, scary paradigms of current American social issues have touched our small sector of the U.S., I am interested to see where this will lead in defining the general view of SLC’s public thinking. Now that it’s happened here at home, we’re kind of forced to have an opinion on it. I will overlook the hardships surrounding this shooting and the fact that video of the incident has not yet been released to the public — instead, I patiently await the verdict of the public and the Salt Lake City Police Department to determine how I, as a good, law-abiding, faithful follower of governmental decrees, ought to really feel about this incident.