Controversy Over Police Killing of Man Mistaken for Suspect

Don Jackson’s poignant commentary (“Imaginary Weapon, Real Corpse,” Op-Ed Page, June 19) on unnecessary police killings in the Los Angeles area was well written and most telling. As both a former cop and victim of police brutality he spoke with a commanding authority. He has chosen a rather dangerous and lonely avocation in monitoring police misconduct--and is more diligent at it, by far, than the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP.

Jackson has been saying--and demonstrating--what many people especially African-Americans, have been complaining about for more than a century. After all, a black man (or woman) never knows when he or she may be felled by some “guardian of the law”--whether it’s a Los Angeles policeman or a Mississippi sheriff. In the aftermath of civil rights confrontations and conflagrations of the 1960s and early 1970s such a person is more likely to be victimized by the former than the latter.

Though African-Americans are the most likely victims of unnecessary police killings, they are not alone. In recent years, though the names of victims and dates of atrocities elude me, they are otherwise vivid, having happened in recent years. Two Mexican nationals killed by L.A. police officers while trying to escape a Skid Row hotel; a Cuban “suspect” is killed (shot in the back) while trying to scale the wall of an alley in South-Central Los Angeles; a man of Korean extraction is shot to death by sheriff’s deputies as he tried to back his car up out of a dead-end alley. Like the victims Jackson named, all were unarmed. Perhaps civilian police can learn something from their military counterparts--how to apprehend people without unnecessarily killing them.

In this domain Jackson is what Dr. Martin Luther King once called a “drum major for justice.” Godspeed.

SHELBY SANKORE

Phillips Ranch