Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  Artie Elliott isn’t included in the Post database, obviously, because it covers fatal police shootings only since 2015. Police shot and killed Artie on June 18, 1993—twenty-eight years ago.

  How did we get to a place where a Black person is shot and killed in the United States almost once every day by law enforcement, and in a majority of those cases, no criminal charges are filed against officers who did the shootings?

  Benjamin Crump, a Black lawyer who represented the family of Trayvon Martin after vigilante George Zimmerman shot and killed the Black teenager in 2012 in Florida, has become the legal representative face of relatives of victims of police shootings—including Breonna Taylor in Louisville, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In televised press conferences, Crump shows up with a consistent message.

  “We want justice.”

  Exactly what that means, we don’t know because “We want justice” provides a great sound bite for broadcast and cable news but doesn’t give viewers any explanation. Clearly, it means more than multimillion-dollar settlements between victims, their families, and the local governments who employ police officers. There’s seldom discussion about underlying forces that led to the shootings or why it was unlikely any police officer would face criminal consequences for their actions, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the shootings seem.

  Artie Elliott was “a typical teenager,” his mother said. “He enjoyed having friends around the house. He loved playing video games. When he was a young child, he was very shy. Artie wouldn’t let me out of his sight.”

  Dorothy Elliott and her husband, Archie Elliott II, a former General District Court judge in Virginia, separated when Artie was four years old. That same year, his appendix ruptured, and Dorothy stayed by his bedside during his hospital stay. “I was so scared,” she said. “It was hard looking at those tubes coming out of him filled with that green liquid. I didn’t leave him. I was there forty-eight hours straight.”

  A mother’s bond with a child—especially between mothers and sons—is strong, even when the child follows a path not preferred by the mother. She knew, for example, that after he was shot and wounded outside of a D.C. nightclub, he bought a small handgun. For protection. Since Artie’s killing, Dorothy has dedicated her life to ensuring that the government agencies that employed the officers who took his life don’t forget that her older son “got no justice.”

  It’s not as if Artie could somehow fade from her memory. The living room walls of her home where she raised Artie are full of photographs of him—by himself; with her; with his younger brother, John. She’s written scores of letters to prosecutors, police chiefs, council members, state legislators, members of Congress, sitting and retired judges. She’s initiated petitions. Made countless phone calls. She led a twenty-five-plus-mile march from her home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., to the state capital in Annapolis. She’s testified at legislative hearings and traveled to South Africa to talk about Artie’s case and police brutality.

  Her demonstrations—at one point for twenty-two straight Wednesdays—seeking to reopen the case against the two officers who killed her son have drawn representatives from Amnesty International; Martin Luther King III, the oldest son of Martin Luther King Jr.; the late Dick Gregory; and activist New York City pastor Mark Thompson, among others.

  There were and are frequent reminders. Shortly after Artie’s death, she took two years off from teaching. “I couldn’t go back,” she said. “There was one young man in particular who reminded me so much of Artie.” Drivers passing by the intersection where Artie was killed and where she maintains a small memorial for her son stop to ask how she’s doing. And then there is one of the members of her church, St. Paul Baptist Church in Forestville, Maryland: Officer Cheney’s sister. “When I first found out who she was, I said something to her in church. A little girl with her overheard me and asked, ‘Is she talking about Uncle Wayne?’

  “This has been my life for the past [twenty-eight] years,” Dorothy Elliott said. “I don’t have any choice. Artie no longer can speak for himself.”

  The details of Artie’s shooting largely stay fresh in Dorothy’s mind. If she’s unsure of particulars, folders of court documents, news clippings, letters, and photographs fill her living room coffee table. Standing on the northeast corner of the intersection where police pulled him over, Dorothy points to the section of curb where passersby had seen Artie sitting handcuffed before police placed him in the front seat of the police cruiser. The lamppost a few feet away from that spot still holds up a handful of artificial flowers that she placed there more than five years ago—green stems with fading red petals. She pointed to a spot in the street several steps away. “His blood was all over there,” she said.

  When Officer Leavitt, who is white, stopped Artie, he said he smelled alcohol. Artie, according to Leavitt, admitted he had been drinking. A lot. It was late spring but hot, and Artie wore only underwear, shorts, and shoes with no shirt. He failed several field sobriety tests, Leavitt said, and was having trouble walking. The officer called for backup, handcuffed Artie, and told the young man he was being arrested for driving while intoxicated. Leavitt said he searched Artie—at least he remembered searching the back side of Artie’s body and shorts but could not recall whether he searched Artie’s front side. He found no weapon or contraband.

  The backup officer arrived. It was Wayne Cheney, a Black patrol officer with the Prince George’s County Police Department. In the car with Cheney was Mark Erik Gamble, a civilian on a police ride-along—a community relations offering from many police departments for civilians interested in how the police work or who are considering policing as a career. Officer Cheney helped Officer Leavitt move Artie from a seat on the curb to the front passenger seat of Leavitt’s patrol cruiser. They fastened a seat belt around Artie and shut the door with the windows rolled up. The two officers stood outside on the passenger side of the vehicle talking when Leavitt noticed movement inside the car. A more focused look, and Leavitt said he saw Artie with his finger on the trigger of a handgun that was pointed toward the officers. Cheney said he also saw Artie with the gun pointed toward them.

  “Gun!” Leavitt screamed and ordered Artie to drop the weapon.

  The officers said he did not. So they both fired their handguns, twenty-two bullets in all, striking Artie fourteen times and leaving quarter-sized holes in the front and rear passenger-side doors of the cruiser. Artie’s hands were cuffed behind his back. His seat belt had been fastened. He was wearing only underwear and shorts, and Leavitt was sure he had checked Artie’s back side for weapons or contraband. But somehow, according to the two officers, Artie was able to maneuver his hands and arms to remove a small handgun from his shorts and point it at the officers with his finger on the trigger. When the shooting stopped, Leavitt said, Artie’s gun was still in his hand.

  A police investigation recommended that both Leavitt and Cheney be exonerated for the fatal shooting. A Prince George’s County grand jury declined to take action against the officers. Investigators determined that Artie had somehow removed his seat belt, pulled his handgun from his shorts, maneuvered his hands to the right side of his body, placed his finger on the gun’s trigger, and aimed at the two officers—all while his hands were handcuffed behind his back. “All the grand jury recommended was that officers get better training on when to shoot their guns and how to better search people in custody,” Dorothy Elliott said.

  Apparently, a key part of clearing the officers was a sworn statement by a man who said Artie had threatened him while both were driving months before the shooting. The other motorist identified the handgun officers recovered from Artie’s hand as the same gun that Artie had used to threaten him. In addition, an FBI report showed that a blue-colored fiber snagged on the gun had come from the shorts that Artie was wearing.

  Dorothy wanted justice.

  “Police could talk for themselves during the investigation,” Dorothy said. “
Artie couldn’t. I shouldn’t have been so naïve. I just knew somebody would be charged. But there was no indictment. No charges whatsoever.”

  About eighteen months later, Prince George’s County officer Wayne Cheney killed again.

  This time, according to police, Cheney fired a single shot that killed twenty-nine-year-old Michael Donald Reed after a high-speed chase just after midnight in February 1995. Cheney told investigators he fired at Reed, who was a passenger in the car, after Reed jumped from the car and looked as if he were reaching into his pants for a gun. Hit once in his chest, Reed died about an hour later at a hospital.

  Police found no gun on or around Reed. Cheney was cleared in that fatal shooting, too.

  Journalists contacted Dorothy Elliott with news about Cheney’s second on-duty fatal shooting. In fact, it turned out to be Cheney’s third officer-involved shooting. The first had happened in the late 1980s when Cheney responded to a domestic dispute and shot and wounded a man police said was armed with a .357 Magnum handgun.

  “I could not believe it,” Dorothy Elliott said. “I felt so sorry for the family. I reached out to Reed’s mother. Cheney should have been in jail for killing Artie. And he should have been in jail for killing Michael Donald Reed.”

  “They See Us as Thugs”

  Bobby Walker Sr. is a Black man who has twenty-three years in law enforcement, fourteen as a member of the Greenville, Mississippi, police department. Since 2019, Walker has been chief of the small Sunflower, Mississippi, Police Department, about thirty miles from Greenville. He comes from a family of police officers. He first wanted to join after attending an older brother’s graduation from the police academy.

  “That got me hooked,” Walker said. He often posts on social media, including clear pro-police phrases such as “Blue Lives Matter.” In midsummer of 2020, after months of protests in cities across the United States led mainly by the Black Lives Matter movement, Walker posted this on Facebook:

  As law enforcement officers, we come in contact with people from all walks of life, no matter the race, gender or creed…we don’t get to choose but we do have an obligation to treat all individuals equal.

  “It had five hundred likes the first day, three thousand in a few days. Now, it has more than a hundred thousand likes,” Walker said. “So many Black officers want to speak out, they want to say something. They hesitate because they don’t want fellow officers to look at them funny. I can do that without worrying because I am the chief here. I don’t have to worry. But the same message I posted needs to come from departments’ leadership. It sets the tone for the morale of the department. Officers will know what you will and won’t put up with. If you let them know you will not tolerate racist actions in their encounters, they won’t do that. Or at least, they won’t do it often.”

  When Walker first saw the video of George Floyd on the pavement with Officer Chauvin’s knee pressed against Floyd’s neck, “My first thought,” Walker said, “was how can we prevent something like this from ever happening again.”

  Chauvin was convicted in April 2021 of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He faced no hate crime–related charges. Minnesota has no hate crime statute.

  Walker and other officers said race and race relations are not topics that come up in many police training academies, especially in small or medium-sized departments, though it is starting to change.

  “They don’t teach about it. And you cannot talk about those shooting situations without talking about race. Ask yourself this question: ‘Are there a disproportionate number of white people killed by Black cops or any cops?’ You don’t have a lot of Black cops killing white people. A big part of the problem seems to be clear to me. We are living at a time when it must be taught how to deal with race issues, mental health issues, domestic issues.”

  In many law enforcement departments across the United States, Walker said, he believes the makeup of the force contributes to the rates that Black men and women are killed by law enforcement officers. “A lot of these white police officers, when they join law enforcement come from areas where they have very little or no experience being around Black people. So that white officer is already uncomfortable around Black people. In some cases, they are afraid of Black people. They see us as ‘thugs.’ They are already afraid of the culture because they are unfamiliar with it.”

  Michelle Randall-Williams, a Black retired New York City police detective, said that systemic racism in the United States has trained the country to believe that “we are the problem. Black is bad. Then that feeds a fear of Blacks. Couple that with police numbers: Law enforcement is predominantly white. And Black people? Those stereotypes. We’re bad. We’re violent. We’re lazy, too. That fear factor kicks in. Slave masters had the same thing. It’s been the American way since Europeans arrived here.”

  As for Floyd, many men and women in law enforcement prefer not to speak publicly on the case, choosing public silence over damaging working relationships with their police colleagues. That isn’t so with retired officers when they are asked their opinion of Floyd’s death.

  “It was murder,” said Alton Bigelow, who retired from the Washington, D.C., police department as a deputy chief. “You don’t do that. And that officer did it as if he had done something like that before. The officers watching—you don’t stand there. You pull him off. I don’t care if he is your field-training officer, or if you’re worried about what other officers will say. It looks like a clear culture problem in that department.”

  Compounding that culture problem and systemic racism that Walker, Randall-Williams, and Bigelow described is the fact that, according to U.S. representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, white supremacists have for years aimed to infiltrate law enforcement. At a prophetic congressional hearing in September 2020, Raskin released an unredacted version of a previously redacted FBI report, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” The report had been released initially in 2006.

  At the virtual hearing of his subcommittee, Raskin heard from several witnesses, including Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi; Heather Taylor, a retired police officer and president of the Ethical Society of Police, based in St. Louis; and Mike German, a former FBI agent who had worked undercover within white supremacist groups. Meeink, now an advocate for racial equality, recounted how he himself had been pointed toward joining law enforcement during his time as a neo-Nazi.

  “I attended a small meeting in Baltimore, run by the National Socialist Movement and a group called SS Action,” Meeink told the subcommittee. “I heard the same rhetoric there. They told us to join law enforcement, so that we can give Blacks [felony charges] so that they wouldn’t be able to legally arm themselves. So that they wouldn’t be able to vote.”

  German, who worked at the FBI for sixteen years and is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, described the efforts of white supremacists to join law enforcement as a matter of national security.

  “If the government knew that al Qaeda or ISIS had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed,” German testified. “Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the United States over the last ten years than any foreign terrorist movement, and both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security regard them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action on the issue of explicit racism, white supremacy, and far-right militancy in law enforcement is critical.”

  In his opening statement at the September 2020 hearing, which was the fourth held by his Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Raskin said that the issue “is disproportionately a threat to Black and brown communities.” He noted that the unredacted report points out that the infiltration of white supremacists into law enforcement has
two principal issues: white supremacist groups encouraging members to join police departments; and current law enforcement officers who share supremacist racist ideas.

  Raskin invited the FBI to send someone to testify at his hearing, but the Bureau passed on the opportunity.

  “The Bureau declined to come,” he said, “claiming they have nothing to say because they have no evidence that this is a widespread problem demanding the FBI’s attention. What’s more, they have attempted to disavow their own 2006 intelligence assessment, which has every sign of being an authentic document.”

  The unredacted portions of the FBI report also warned that law enforcement could “volunteer their professional resources to the white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”

  “These are chilling conclusions,” Raskin said. “But rather than clearly spell out this threat for the American people, the FBI has suppressed them from public view for fourteen years. For the first time, we can now see that the FBI believed internally that white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement departments was a serious problem, a source of potential abuse of power and authority on the street and a source of potential violence against the civilian population.”

  Less than six months after Raskin’s hearing, in the aftermath of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, videos of Capitol Police officers went viral showing an officer wearing a MAGA hat during the riot, another officer taking time to snap a selfie with a rioter, and another video showing officers who seemed to pull back a barricade to usher rioters into the building. Within a week, at least fourteen Capitol Police officers were investigated by federal authorities for possible involvement in the riots. Within two weeks, authorities had identified about thirty law enforcement officers from several police agencies across the country as attendees at the rally prior to the riot at the Capitol. One from Rocky Mount, Virginia. A few from Philadelphia. Another from Houston. The night of the riot, the head of the Chicago Police Department’s 12,000-member union supported the mob in a television interview.