A White Officer Shoots a Black Colleague, Deepening a Racial Divide A
A White Officer Shoots a Black Colleague, Deepening a Racial Divide
Although they all wear blue, white officers and black officers experience strained relations in St. Louis’s Police Department.
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Mr. Green’s shift as a community liaison officer with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had ended hours earlier, and he was spending a quiet evening helping a friend work on his pickup truck. Then a sedan came screeching around the corner and ended up near his front yard. Another sedan pulled up in a hurry, and Mr. Green felt a brief sense of ease when men in police vests hopped out. They were fellow officers. Sort of.
Mr. Green had been a police officer for more than a decade. And while he had bonded with colleagues across the department, he also had come to see distinct differences between black officers like himself and white officers like those involved in the pursuit that night. He had heard his share of racially insensitive remarks at work, but on that balmy evening in 2017, Mr. Green’s outlook on the differences between black and white officers would be damaged beyond repair.
He heard a bang. He felt a sting in his right forearm. A white colleague had shot him.
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On the night Mr. Green was shot, he said, he did what he thought he had to: He sprang into action when he saw an armed man on the run. As he confronted the suspect, though, he heard someone order him to drop his weapon. Mr. Green tossed down his gun and belly-flopped onto the grass. A white detective recognized him a few moments later and warned the others that Mr. Green was a police officer, too.
Mr. Green got up and ambled toward the detective who knew him, his gun pointed down in his right hand. He held out his badge so there would be no confusion. He had grown up on the city’s North Side and had been stopped plenty of times by the police for no good reason before he had gotten his badge, he said.
He took a few steps and then again heard a voice yell for him to drop his weapon, followed almost immediately, he said, by a gunshot. He clutched his right forearm and looked over at the white officer who had shot him.
“Man, you done shot me,” Mr. Green recalled saying before blood started spouting from his arm. He became weak and dropped to his knees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/24/us/st-louis-race-police.html
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