Easter Leafa was sitting beneath a blanket on her balcony with a knife when Anchorage police arrived, responding to a name for assist from her household. Instead of displaying her arms as instructed, they stated, the 16-year-old woman stood and approached them with the blade.
Two officers opened fireplace concurrently, one with a less-lethal foam projectile and the opposite with actual bullets, killing her two days earlier than Leafa was to start out her junior yr of highschool. She had not too long ago moved from American Samoa to get a greater training and was nonetheless studying English, her household stated.
Leafa was amongst seven folks shot by Anchorage police since May, the newest a murder suspect critically injured after officers stated he opened fireplace on them Friday afternoon. That is greater than twice as many because the division sometimes shoots in a yr. have been killed.
The spate has made Anchorage the newest in a protracted checklist of American cities to wrestle with and prompted an apology to Leafa’s household together with guarantees of reform from the town’s new mayor.
“This cannot be our new normal,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance instructed a news convention after Leafa’s loss of life.
The different six shootings concerned suspects who reportedly had firearms, shot at police or, in two instances, have been armed murder suspects.
The chief of the town’s police union, Darrell Evans, instructed in a press release Friday that the bizarre spike in shootings by officers mirrored “the chaos our city is facing.” There have been 20 homicides in Anchorage this yr, 14 previously few months.
While that whole is already approaching final yr’s 23 with a couple of third of the yr nonetheless to go, it is roughly in step with typical Anchorage murder totals: there have been 35 in 2019 and 28 in 2022.
At least 4 of these shot by police have been folks of coloration, and that has particularly rattled Anchorage’s minority residents.
The metropolis is without doubt one of the most numerous within the U.S., with massive populations of Asian, Hispanic and Alaska Native folks, together with many who got here for army service and remained. There are over 100 languages spoken by college students in Anchorage faculties, and the U.S. Census stated Anchorage had the 4 most racially and ethnically numerous neighborhoods within the nation after the 2020 depend.
The police division has tried to over the previous decade, however nonetheless 7 in 10 officers are white, excess of the town’s inhabitants of 291,000, which is slightly over half white, based on Census knowledge.
Source: www.anews.com.tr