In this op-ed, Zoé Samudzi, a writer and PhD student at the University of California, San Francisco, explores the innocence and criminality of black lives in the wake of the shooting death of Jordan Edwards.

On Saturday, April 29, 15-year-old Jordan Edwards was leaving a party in a Dallas suburb in a car with four other teenagers, including his two brothers, when police officer Roy Oliver opened fire and struck him in the head.

Officers from the Balch Springs Police Department claimed they had gotten a call from a neighbor about a group of drunk teenagers walking down a residential street, apparently leaving a house party nearby. The day after the shooting, Balch Springs Police chief Jonathan Haber initially said that an officer, who has since been fired, shot at the car after it began "backing down the road toward the Officers in an aggressive manner.” But, after further review of video footage from front-facing body cameras worn at the scene, the police chief later said his statement was “unintentionally incorrect,” and that the unreleased video indicated that the car was actually moving away from the officers. To make the entire incident even more traumatic, one of Jordan’s brothers was handcuffed and held in jail overnight afterward, even though he was not a suspect. He was released the following morning without charges, which is when he found out about his younger brother’s death.

"There were no weapons involved; there was no aggressive behavior; these were not suspects," Lee Merritt, a lawyer for Jordan’s family, told The New York Times, which reported that Jordan was a popular football player, well-liked, friendly — an all-around good kid. “Awesome parents,” said the parent of a teammate. "He was not a thug. This shouldn’t happen to him."

By over-emphasizing Jordan’s extracurricular activities, good academic standing, and innocence — like the parent of his teammate did when he expressed that this should not have happened to him and mentioned the presence of both of his parents, seemingly to contradict stereotypes about single-parent “broken homes” as a cause for black criminality or poor achievement — it is implied that this conceivably should have happened to someone else.

Jordan has become the perfect victim: Balch Springs police admitted they put forth an untrue version of the events, and reports claim he was an otherwise squeaky-clean young person. One might argue that a victim like Jordan “did everything right” and so does not deserve to be shot and killed in an incident of police brutality, where the racist motive for an undeserving victim is clear. But when a black person is armed, or may be armed, or has a concealed weapon (legally or not), mental health issues and is perceived as a threat to safety, or is otherwise a danger, a similarly fatal response may be considered more acceptable. These appeals to innocence assume the default condition of black people is criminal, until public opinion is persuaded to understand them as unique cases not representative of black people as a whole. And given the short attention span of media consumers in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, initial police statements, like the one botched by the Balch Springs Police Department, are important because people tend to make quick judgements, ones that may be unlikely to change.

Innocence and empathy for black victims are, thus, never assured.

We’ve seen this cycle over and over again when a black person is killed by the police: The victim’s grieving family is shown on television, and sometimes protesters are shown marching on the streets of a city mobilized by the violence. A police chief shares the officer's account of the incident, and we are left to make sense of yet another black life taken at the hands of police. In some cases, like Jordan's, people will call for accountability and base their appeals on tropes of black excellence, or the potential of black childhood, as was the case with 12-year-old Tamir Rice (though even his youth was not enough for the officer to be indicted). Even the decision to memorialize some, but not all, victims with hashtags represents how we selectively honor their lives.