by Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP. Originally published at TheGrio.com.
In the five weeks since Mark Anthony Barmore was gunned down by police officers in an Illinois daycare center, answers remain elusive.
By all accounts, the 23-year-old African American man was unarmed when police officers Oda Poole and Stan North approached him in a church parking lot. Although Barmore was only wanted for questioning in a domestic dispute, officers pursued him with guns drawn, even after he ran into the church's daycare facility. Minutes later Barmore was dead. The police shot him three times in the back as the center's terrified children looked on.
The brutal, public nature of this killing has thrust the city of Rockford into the spotlight, and posed disturbing questions about accountability and the use of excessive force. While the official police report claims Barmore was shot after he reached for an officer's gun, witnesses tell a different story. They say Barmore had already surrendered; that he was shot after emerging from a storage closet with his hands up. One witness, a teenage girl, says she was threatened by police if she did not change her story to conform to the official report.
It may be tempting to view this story exclusively through the prism of race, and, truth be told, many elements of the story indicate that race probably played a role in the decisions that were made that day. But the fact remains that police violence can happen to anyone, regardless of color or ethnicity.
