Precisely how did Korryn Gaines die? We don’t know, and probably never will.
The Baltimore County, Maryland Police Department admits that one of its officers shot her dead on August 1. In fact, the department admits that the officer shot first and that Gaines then returned fire in self-defense and defense of her five-year-old son (no, the department does not use those terms) before being gunned down.
The police also admit that before forcing their way into Gaines’s apartment and killing her, they went out of their way to ensure their actions would be hidden from public view. The department contacted two social media services, Facebook and Instagram, asking that Gaines’s accounts be disabled so as to cut off her photo and video streams of what was happening. To their everlasting shame, the two firms complied with the request.
So we don’t know what happened. But we have a pretty good idea what happens next: The Baltimore County Police Department will “investigate” itself and announce that it has cleared itself and the unidentified officer who killed Gaines (he or she is currently on paid vacation, aka “administrative leave,” until the “investigation” is over) of any wrongdoing.
Baltimore County police chief James Johnson characterizes his department’s desire for “peace” as the overriding priority justifying the concealment operation. Social media contacts needed to be stopped from urging her “not to comply with negotiators’ request that she surrender peacefully,” he says. “For hours, we pleaded with her to end this peacefully.”
Let’s dispense with the risible claim that “peace” was the priority here. Had that been the case, Johnson could have just called it a night and directed his officers to get in their cars and drive away. Problem solved. Easy, peace-y.
If the priority was not “peace,” then what was it?
Officer safety? No. Sending an officer into an apartment occupied by an armed woman isn’t very safe for the officer at all.
Public safety? No. At least one police officer fired multiple rounds — firing first, remember? — in an apartment building. Those rounds were probably 9mm, 10mm or .45 caliber rounds which could have penetrated walls (Gaines was allegedly armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a much safer weapon for people on the other side of a wall).
The Baltimore County Police Department’s number one priority, their overriding concern, wasn’t peace, or officer safety, or public safety. It was — as has become the case with many American police departments, much of the time — successful exercise of authority at any price.
That’s why the Baltimore County PD covered up the details of their killing of the ninth American woman of color to die at police hands this year. Just like a cat in a litter box.
[Originally published at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. Free for re-use under Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication.]