A POLICE officer fatally guns down a man in cold blood. The shooting is captured on video, which promptly goes viral. The footage shows the man fleeing from several officers. As he turns to face them, he is shot and falls dead to the ground.
The description may sound similar to the shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson last year, or to the killing of a 12-year-old in Cleveland last November. But this episode occurred earlier this month, in Pasco, Wash.; the victim was a 35-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant named Antonio Zambrano-Montes. There is outrage in Pasco — about 700 people marched in one protest — but not a lot of hope that justice will be served. Although the killing has been viewed almost 2 million times on YouTube, the reaction has been relatively muted, in part because Pasco, a city of approximately 68,000 that’s about 60 percent Hispanic, also has a sizable undocumented population that has been afraid to protest loudly.
Police said Zambrano-Montes, an orchard worker, was throwing rocks in a busy intersection and hit two police officers. According to the police account, he refused to drop the rocks before he fled and was shot dead. Some 15 rounds were fired by police in a congested area. But it’s clear from the video that Zambrano-Montes posed no serious risk to the officers, and a more proportionate response was called for. The Pasco Police Department has a track record of excessive force, and the regional special investigations unit already has exonerated police in three recent Pasco police shootings. One of the officers involved in the death of Zambrano-Montes was accused of racially profiling a Hispanic woman in an arrest that led to second-degree burns on her hands, and ultimately a $100,000 jury verdict in her favor.
An expedited federal investigation of this shooting is in order. Local Hispanic leaders rightly believe that the findings of a regional investigation unit will lack credibility. The family of Zambrano-Montes has hired the national civil rights attorney who represented the families of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old in Cleveland. As the Justice Department prepares to sue the Ferguson Police Department over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics, it should not passively wait for justice to be thwarted in Pasco. The deterioration of police relations in minority communities requires more policing of police, and killings like the one in Pasco demand stricter accountability on the federal level.
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• Justin Ellis: Ferguson yet another example of how America fails minorities