If you’re a white, 15-year-old honor student, chances are you won’t get shot and killed by police officers with rifles. This is worth noting because someone, somewhere will eventually try to defend this act and derail this conversation. But Jordan Edwards is dead. He was leaving a house party in Balch Springs, Texas, on Saturday night. He was unarmed. He was in a car with his friends, who were also unarmed. And while we do not know all the facts surrounding his death, we also know that these things do not generally earn white kids a death sentence.
Balch Springs police Chief Jonathan Haber said officers heard gunshots as they were responding to a call of drunken teens about 11 p.m. in the 12300 block of Baron Drive.
Haber said the vehicle Jordan was in backed down the road toward officers "in an aggressive manner."
An officer fired at the vehicle and struck Jordan, who was pronounced dead at a hospital, Balch Springs police said in a written statement.
Of course, the officer’s story is being disputed by Jordan’s family and friends.
Tuesday, May 2, 2017 · 12:24:16 PM +00:00 · Kelly Macias
As of Monday afternoon, Balch Springs police Chief Jonathan Haber told reporters at a press conference that video evidence showed that the officer fired at the car when it was “moving forward as the officers approached.” This contradicts the officer’s original story that the car was driving in reverse down the street in an aggressive manner. Lee Merritt, lawyer for the Edwards family, praised the transparency of the police department for admitting this and suggested they need to move forward with an arrest.
[Lee Merritt, the family’s attorney] challenged the police account that the vehicle Jordan was riding in was driving aggressively.
It "will not hold water when the facts come out," he said.
Merritt said Jordan and the others in the vehicle were not the teens police had initially been called about and had not been drinking. He said they did not face any charges.
In fact, Merritt says he “was leaving a house party because he thought it was getting dangerous.” Jordan was a ninth grader on the Mesquite High School football team with a GPA above 3.5. He was described by his football coach as a really great kid.
"The best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world would happen, and he'd smile and everything would be OK," [Head Coach Jeff Fleener said.] "You create a checklist of everything you would want in a player, a son, a teammate, a friend and Jordan had all that. He was that kid."
So here’s a kid smart enough to leave a rowdy party before he got caught up in trouble—and he ends up dead, anyway. How long before the police department and the media try to paint him as a thug who caused his own death? How long before they start dredging up his parents’ pasts and paint him as another stereotype? How long before a random social media post shows up with him quoting gangsta rap lyrics and using the n-word? He may turn out to have been the perfect student (doubtful at age 15), but even so, we don’t need to make Jordan Edwards out to be a noble victim to see a problem here. The fact remains that this shouldn’t happen.
This is an all-too-common occurrence: black teens are 21 more times likely to be shot and killed by police than their white peers. So despite what naysayers want to believe, this happens routinely. It is happening with alarming frequency. White bodies are not met with the kind of state-sanctioned violence that black bodies are met with. Again, white honor students do not go to parties and get shot by police. Police violence against black people is a serious problem—one that needs to be addressed immediately, and one that will only get worse with unabashed white supremacists running our government.