Editor's note: Longtime New Mexico newsman and author Wally Gordon is on an extended stay in California where he's dispatching his adventures and observations.
The headlines are all too familiar to a New Mexican: Cop shoots, kills unarmed suspect. It has happened so often in Albuquerque that the FBI is now investigating the city police department at the request of the city council. But the headlines of the past week are not from New Mexico but from a small California city 10 miles from where I have been temporarily living.
At 3:14 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 24, two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies radioed that they had spotted a suspicious person. Ten seconds later, the suspect had been fatally shot.
What happened was that the two deputies, one a 24-year veteran of the force and the other a trainee, had been riding in their police car when they saw Andy Lopez, a 13-year-old Hispanic boy, walking down Moorland Avenue. He was wearing a hoodie and carrying what looked to the officers like an AK-47 semi-automatic military-style assault rifle.
The veteran deputy yelled at the boy to drop the gun. Instead of dropping the gun, he turned toward them and, according to the police report, raised the barrel. The veteran cop fired eight shots, hitting the boy seven times. The coroner found that two of the shots were fatal.
The killing has made national and even international headlines. Every news organization from the national Associated Press wire to the Guardian in London has been following the story. The county and the city of Santa Rosa have launched a joint investigation. The FBI is conducting its own investigation.
The city and county are in an uproar. There have been daily demonstrations and marches. Kids have poured out of the schools onto the streets. The area is full of signs denouncing what many are calling a police war on the neighborhood.
It almost sounds like something that could have happened in Albuquerque, where dozens of suspects have been shot by police over the past decade.
The Santa Rosa incident has sparked reams of analysis in an effort to explain how it could have happened. The local newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, has done an especially fine job of reporting the crisis and investigating its causes. The reporting has highlighted eight factors, seven of which apply equally to Albuquerque:
1. Children increasingly have and use real guns. The day before the Santa Rosa shooting, a 12-year-old boy walked into his middle school in Sparks, Nev., shot to death a popular math teacher, wounded two of his classmates and then killed himself.
2. Toy guns are made to look like real guns. What the boy in Santa Rosa was carrying was not a real gun. It was an air gun, a toy that shot plastic pellets, that was made to look identical to an AK-47. Such toys, under a federal law passed in the 1990s, is supposed to have a small red plastic attachment at the end of the barrel signifying that it is a toy. For an unknown reason, Andy Lopez’s gun did not have the attachment.
3. A large percentage of people, especially in Western states like New Mexico and California, now own and carry guns, thus forcing cops to assume that any suspect is armed.
4. Increasingly, these guns are high powered, sometimes more so than what cops have.
5. Thus cops, with good reason, feel increasingly vulnerable, with the result that they have to react almost instantaneously to any perceived threat, no matter how slight the evidence of an attack.
6. Police forces in recent years have expanded rapidly, accounting for a high percentage of rookies.
7. Training of cops in New Mexico, California and most other states emphasizes that when cops do fire, they should shoot to kill, not disable, a suspect.
8. The great racial divide between Hispanics and Anglos in much of California creates tension, suspicion and miscommunication that can easily explode into the kind of crisis that exists today in Santa Rosa.
The first seven items apply equally to Albuquerque and Santa Rosa, New Mexico and California. The great difference is the eighth.
New Mexico, where three out of five people are Hispanic or Indian (populations with a lot of genetic overlap) is not a segregated society. While Hispanics are poorer than Anglos on average, they own many businesses and dominate state and local politics. They live in all parts of Albuquerque and the surrounding area. It is almost impossible to find a substantial community in New Mexico without leading Hispanic members.
All this is not true of California, of which Santa Rosa is an apt example.
In the 1960’s Santa Rosa built a freeway through the middle of the city, dividing it into two parts and ruining its old downtown. Today, Hispanics, almost all recent immigrants from Mexico, are concentrated west of the freeway, while whites predominate on the east side. The nearly 160,000 people in the city are 29 percent Hispanic and 60 percent non-Hispanic whites.
Describing the area where Andy Lopez lived and was slain, the Press Democrat reported, “This community stands as a place altogether apart, many of its residents feeling pushed to the edge.”
In a full-page analysis on Sunday, the newspaper added, “It is clear that the shooting has exposed and deepened a rift of distrust of law enforcement, one widened by divisions in race, ethnicity and class, some say, and represented last week in an unprecedented series of protests, vigils and marches that crisscrossed Santa Rosa.”
Andy Lopez was killed a few hundred yards outside the city, on an impoverished Hispanic street where there has been a lot of crime. But he himself was a clean-cut kid who had not been in trouble and did not have a police recorded. Family and friends say he had a bright future.
A good part of the reason the killing has caused such an uproar is that Santa Rosa Hispanics feel mistreated by the police and ignored by the government. They live in isolation from the larger society.
Throughout California, I have been aware of how this is really two states, unequal and almost unknown to each other. I see Hispanic laborers bent over in the fields picking the grapes and other crops that support this prosperous semi-rural area. I see the Hispanics manning produce stands at the farmers’ markets and selling used clothes at the Sebastopol flea market. I buy cheese from the Hispanic family down the road from my house.
But when my wife and I go to a play, a dance performance or even a free concert, we hardly see any Hispanics. In our village, Sebastopol, the stores, most of which are upscale, are run by Anglos. While rural areas are somewhat checkerboard, cities like Santa Rosa have developed a pattern of segregation that doesn’t exist in New Mexico.
Although there is much distrust between the police and some Hispanic communities in New Mexico, there is not the ubiquitous segregation and the sense of exclusion and powerlessness that haunt California society. Thus while New Mexicans have made nearly as many mistakes as our California cousins, we have done at least one thing right, and that has made all the difference.
Responses to “Across the Ethnic Divide”