The US justice department will investigate the police shooting of a Native American woman in Arizona, a spokesman said on Friday, a day after footage released by the Winslow police department raised concerns about racial bias in the fatal shooting.
The department’s civil rights division will review the local investigation into the 27 March shooting death of Loreal Tsingine, spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said.
Tsingine, 27, was shot and killed by Winslow police officer Austin Shipley in late March after officers suspected her of shoplifting in a local store and confronted her. Silent body-camera footage, first obtained by the Arizona Daily Sun, shows a police officer trying to restrain Tsingine then shoving her to the ground and finally drawing a gun on her as she approaches him.
In the video, Tsingine gets up and walks toward Shipley with a small pair of medical scissors in her left hand, and another officer quickly approaches her from behind. Shipley draws his gun and directs it at Tsingine, and the footage is cut off before he fires the fatal shot.
The shooting was ruled justified by the Maricopa County attorney’s office last Friday.
Tsingine’s aunt, Floranda Dempsey, said her niece was 5ft tall and weighed 95lbs. “They should have been able to subdue her with their huge size and weight,” she said. “It wasn’t like she came at them first. I’m sure anyone would be mad if they were thrown around.” She added: “Where were the Tasers, pepper sprays, batons?”
The family filed a $10.5m wrongful death lawsuit against the city at the beginning of the month, claiming that “the city of Winslow was negligent in hiring, training, retaining, controlling and supervising” the officer who killed Tsingine.
Shipley’s training records show two of his fellow officers had serious concerns that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, that he ignored directives from superiors, and that he was liable to falsify reports and not control his emotions.
A day before Shipley’s training ended, nearly three years ago, a police corporal recommended that the Winslow police department not retain him.
“They were warned he was likely to hurt someone back in 2013 or so, by another commanding officer,” Dempsey said. “It’s unbelievable as to why he was still allowed to wear a badge.”
Dempsey said watching the video shocked her and made her angry, and that all she saw was “a bully who got angry for getting his ego squashed” by a small Native American woman.
Nationwide, Native Americans are disproportionately killed by police. Based on data from The Counted, the Guardian’s database of police killings in the US, fatal police shootings of black, white, Hispanic and Asian Americans have all gone down slightly or remained roughly the same from 2015 into 2016, but twice as many Native Americans have been killed over the same period.
Because the number of Native Americans, relative to other racial and ethnic categories, is quite small, just a handful of incidents can dramatically change the per capita rate. Still, 13 Native American people have been killed just over halfway through 2016, more than the 10 that were killed in all of 2015.
Tsingine is one of four Native American women killed in 2016, representing about 30% of the incidents affecting native people. By contrast, among all racial groups women represent victims in about 3% of fatal shootings. For comparison, only one Hispanic or Asian American woman has been shot and killed by police in all of 2016, even though they represent a much larger portion of the population than Native American women.
In another controversial shooting of a Native American woman this year, pregnant 32-year-old Jacqueline Salyers was killed after she allegedly drove her vehicle towards a Tacoma, Washington, police officer. Although the US justice department has repeatedly advised against officers shooting at moving vehicles, the incident was ruled justified by county prosecutors in May.
Simon Moya-Smith, an activist and Oglala-Lakota tribal member, said it was “unfortunate that Native Americans are routinely excluded from this conversation” about racialized police violence. Moya-Smith noted as an example that in her Democratic nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, Hillary Clinton did not mention systemic racialized violence or discrimination against Native Americans.
“We know that many people don’t see us as human. We’re relics of centuries of lore,” Moya-Smith said. “We first need to get the cops to recognize us as human, and hopefully then they won’t think of themselves as the judge, the jury and the executioner.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report