Hot Take!!! The cop pulled the trigger, but the system murdered Ma'Khia Bryant

Ma’Khia Bryant was buried on April 30. She was only sixteen years old. She was shot by a police officer after being involved in a violent altercation which involved her being threatened and possibly assaulted by four girls. When police arrived on the scene Ma’Khia was seen to be wielding a knife and potentially attacking one of the girls. After a few moments on the scene an officer assessed that she was going to use fatal force on the girl and shot Ma’Khia four times in the chest. The footage is available because the tragedy was captured on a police bodycam.

I think it’s important to state unequivocally that Ma’Khia Bryant was murdered. After viewing the tape, many people have concluded that the police officer was justified in shooting her because she had pinned one of the girls up against a car and had a knife in her hand. It looked like she was going to stab the girl. People have used excuses like she shouldn’t have had a knife or that the police officer should have done everything he could do to save the girl that was going to be attacked.

But the fact remains that the police officer made a split second choice to pull the trigger and kill Ma’Khia Bryant. She’s dead and nothing can bring her back. It’s not her fault, the police officer killed Ma’Khia Bryant, but the system murdered her. With little information available to the public outside the video, the death of Ma’Khia Bryant gives rise to many more questions than can probably be answered. Ma’Khia was being harassed and potentially assaulted by four older girls, why did no one step in to stop this bullying before it escalated? Adults were around when the altercation was ongoing why did none of them step in to diffuse the situation before involving police? Ma’Khia was a foster child what were the socioeconomic conditions that caused this to be the case?

These are all great questions but as I viewed the video, I could not help noticing how the police officer pulls out his gun almost immediately after arriving on the scene. What strikes me more than anything is that in other situations which are just as violent but involve people who are not Black the police are less inclined to think that deadly force is necessary to bring the situation to resolution. 

It is this judgement and the training that supports this judgement which is at question here. We may look at the killing of Ma’Khia as justified, but that is because we’ve been indoctrinated with certain preconceptions about how police must act in a certain situations. We must re examine and reconsider these preconceptions. The police officer’s first reaction cannot in be to respond with deadly force, in any situation. Second, even though Ma’Khia had the knife and looked like she was going to do something with it there is no way to know if the 16 year old girl really would have gone through with that act. As far as we know she had no history of violence and she was not a hardened criminal. It takes a lot to actually look into someone’s face and stab them with a knife. Ma’Khia was not a gang member. By all accounts she was a good student. There is a chance she would have pulled back or halted. But now we’ll never know because the police officer made a decision to end her life. 

Aside from the fact that the police officer’s training led him to make a possibly rash decision which ended life prematurely. The police officer’s training led him to make a decision that put more people in danger than it protected. What if he had missed, or what if the girl he was trying to help was hit? She and others were in close proximity with the shots. Why not fire a warning shot in the air? Finally, what the police officer should have been trained to do is to make a decision in that moment to put himself between the knife and the girl who was being attacked. This may have resulted in him being stabbed, but a police officer is expected to protect and serve and that is a responsibility that may require that officer putting their own life in jeopardy. 

Police officers continue to say they are trained in de escalation, but that training never seems to kick in when Black people are involved. If we are going to continue to accept a system where police are allowed to use rapid and deadly force to engage civilians; we must also acknowledge that maybe police don’t need to be deployed into every situation. We must ask ourselves what kind of society we want. Are we a society that is fine with violence being deployed first to resolve problems, or will we support police training and culture which seeks to use de escalation as a first resort and violence as a last one? I don’t know if restraint on the part of the officer would have saved Ma’Khia life. Maybe it would have still resulted in death. But what I do know is the current situation is creating a lot of unnecessary death already. Law enforcement representatives are saying the shooting was justified. But was it really? No, we can rationalize Ma’Khia’s death because she was holding a knife. But we live in a society where implicit and explicit racism clouds the judgement of police officers. Police training emphasizes the use of force over de escalation. We know it doesn’t really matter what a Black person might be doing for an officer to feel unsafe. Given all of these circumstances I could never say Ma’Khia’s death is justifiable. The police officer would likely be found innocent of murder if tried, but that’s because implicit and explicit racism; police training, socioeconomic conditions, and an eroding sense of community conspired to murder Ma’Khia Bryant.