Calling 911 should not be a death-wish. On Saturday, police were called to Quintonio LeGrier’s home because he was suffering from a mental health episode which frightened his family. Legrier, a 19-year-old college student, and 55-year-old grandmother-activist Bettie Jones ended up dead – both were shot by Chicago police.

LeGrier’s father, who called the police, said that his son had “emotional issues”. It’s still unclear how police came to shoot Quintonio seven times. Police say Bettie Jones, a neighbor, was “accidentally” shot. The officers involved in this shooting are on desk duty for at least 30 days pending a department investigation into their actions. There may be no video this time. Few in Chicago expect accountability.

In a city like Chicago, those with mental health issues are particularly vulnerable to police violence; since Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed half of the public mental health clinics in 2012, police are our mental health first responders. Sins Invalid, a disability justice-based performance project, issued a statement on police violence last year suggesting that “disabled people who are autistic, who are deaf, who live with mental health impairments, or cognitive impairments, epilepsy or movement disorders, are at highest risk of being assaulted by police”.



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This is corroborated by an analysis conducted by the Washington Post this June. It’s important to add the word black to disabled people. In general, black people are at the highest risk of dying at the hands of the police.

Given these statistics – and the recent incident in Chicago – some might wonder whether it is best to avoid calling the police altogether. Yet, for many black people, law enforcement is ever-present in our overly surveilled neighborhoods. We don’t have to call them to encounter them. They are already here and always ready to harass, target and kill us.

Black residents of Chicago are also suffering from more than just police violence. As Joao Vargas writes: “Police brutality is just one aspect of a constellation unendingly generating anti-black forces.” Black communities have been and continue to suffer from overall divestment and neglect. Our politicians seem content to leave black people to die.



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This was the conclusion reached by Anna Jones. This summer, the 36-year-old mother, took part in a 34-day hunger strike to protest against the closing of Dyett high school. Dyett was the last open-enrollment public high school in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville community. After the first 18 days of the strike, Chicago Public Schools announced that Dyett would reopen as an arts-based school rather than as the green technology one demanded by the hunger strikers.

Jones told the Chicago Reader: “I hated to end the strike because I didn’t want the mayor or the aldermen to feel like we were giving up. But we had to end it because we knew that the mayor would leave us out there to die.”

These words explain so much of what we face in Chicago in this historical moment.

To protect the lives and futures of black Chicagoans we need more than just changes in policing. We need to address structural and systemic oppression; that involves securing a living wage and guaranteed jobs; keeping our schools public and stopping closures and speeding up decarceration by ending things like cash bail.

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To prevent these kinds of deaths from happening again, we will need community-based mental health services and to create alternatives outside of police to respond to crises. We also will need accountability, which is why local activists and organizers are calling for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation and that of Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez.

We understand that all of these solutions are interconnected; that they are essential to living lives free from violence and are critical to our liberation.

Extrajudicial killing of black people is the norm, not the exception. The stories bleed and blend into each other, colorless. Another day, another death to absorb and many are numb. Words are achingly insufficient in the face of so much brutality – now is the time for actions.