Vol. 79/No. 30      August 24, 2015

Fifty people, including Hammond’s family, held a vigil to honor his life Aug. 7 in the Hardee’s restaurant parking lot where he was killed. A Rally for Justice for Hammond is scheduled for Aug. 15, called by an African-American opponent of gun violence and backed by the family.

Initially refusing to identify the officer, Seneca Police Chief John Covington said that the shooting was self-defense because Hammond drove his vehicle directly “towards the officer” in an effort to run him down.

However, a private autopsy showed that Hammond was shot twice from behind through the open driver’s window.

“Clearly this officer was not in any danger at the time he fired the two shots into the car,” Eric Bland, attorney for Hammond’s family, told Reuters Aug. 11.

Covington claimed Tiller was part of a sting to arrest Hammond’s date for selling drugs. But she was arrested solely for misdemeanor possession of marijuana and released.

The killing of Hammond has drawn comparison with recent indictments of cops who shot Black men in traffic stops, including Michael Slager’s killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Ray Tensing’s killing of Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati.

Bland noted that the majority of people killed by cops in the U.S. are Caucasian. “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,” he told the Washington Post.

About half of the 585 people killed by cops so far this year were Caucasian, the Post reported. Twenty-five percent were Black, although African-Americans make up only 13 percent of the population.

Federal officials announced Aug. 12 they will conduct a civil rights investigation of the shooting. Hammond’s family is also calling for the state to release footage from the cop’s dashboard camera.

Some activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have written about Hammond’s killing on social media, including DeRay McKesson, who was arrested protesting in St. Louis on the one-year anniversary of the cop killing of Michael Brown in the overwhelmingly Black suburb of Ferguson.
 
 
Related articles:
Protests mark year since cop killed Michael Brown
Marchers in Ferguson say Black lives matter
 
 
 
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