Many of us are just hearing about the police shooting that claimed the life of19-year-old Zachary Hammond on July 26.
The news lands with that familiar, convulsive ache that the death of young people brings. That a year of police-involved killings has given us.
The teenager, on a first date, was stopped in the parking lot of a Seneca, S.C., Hardee’s during a drug bust, and the officer contends he fired in self-defense as Hammond tried to run him over. His 23-year-old date was charged with possession of 10 grams (.35 ounces) of marijuana. And it feels like a life gone over so much nothing.
Yet Hammond’s killing, under cloudy circumstances — a police report never mentions the fatal gunshots — has not sparked national protests. It has not pricked us the way Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Brandon Jones, Eric Harris and Freddie Gray did. The way the killing of Samuel DuBose most recently and under the most similar circumstances did. (DuBose was also behind the wheel; the Cincinnati officer who shot him alleged that DuBose was dragging him as he was taking off.)
Hammond’s family contends that the unequal outrage is because Hammond is white.
Zachary Hammond was shot and killed by police during a drug bust in Seneca, South Carolina. (Courtesy of Eric Bland)
“It’s sad, but I think the reason is, unfortunately, the media and our government officials have treated the death of an unarmed white teenager differently than they would have if this were a death of an unarmed black teen,” the family’s attorney, Eric Bland, told my colleague Abby Phillip this week. “The hypocrisy that has been shown toward this is really disconcerting.”
Unlike the high-profile cases, no video has surfaced, so there is no objective standard of truth to judge the shooting against. That aside,
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