Policing is never about care, and that is why so many are demanding that we rethink the meaning of public safety.
Sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant’s TikTok is going viral. In one particular video, her eyes sparkle. For a cheeky moment, her smile is wide. As she listens to Bryson Tiller, she is styling her hair and reveling in her Black girl adolescence. Devastatingly, now, millions of people are mourning the loss and remembering the life of this Black teenage girl killed in Columbus, Ohio. Nicholas Reardon of the Columbus Division of Police shot her four times on Tuesday. As many were celebrating the Minneapolis jury’s decision to convict Derek Chauvin for his murder of George Floyd while others insisted that a conviction would not build a more just world, Ma’Khia died in a local hospital. Her killing is a reminder of the urgency of the ongoing struggles against a murderous system that disproportionately kills Black people and for a world where Ma’Khia would still be with us today. Protests started almost immediately at the foster home where Ma’Khia was shot. They have continued since — at the police headquarters and the Ohio State House. On Wednesday, students at Ohio State University occupied the student union and held 16 minutes of silence in her memory before they marched downtown. They are renewing their demands from last summer’s student government petition — which garnered over 17,000 signatures — calling on Ohio State University to cut its contracts with the police department, to divest from military gear and to invest in student life. The campaign to remove police from Columbus city schools also released a statement condemning the local police and honoring Ma’Khia. We still don’t know much about Ma’Khia, or even who called 911 from a neighborhood in southeast Columbus. In fact, most early reports about Ma’Khia misspelled her name. The only major things we know about this specific police-perpetrated murder are that someone called the police to report being attacked, Ma’Khia had a knife in her hand when police arrived and Reardon shot Ma’Khia multiple times within seconds of arriving. Given these scant details coupled with the police body camera footage that shows Reardon shooting at close range into a crowd of Black people, many people have already concluded that the police acted rightly. A growing number of people are arguing that the killing of this 16-year-old girl is justifiable, even though the body camera footage includes no indication that the police ever asked her to put the knife down.
