On Monday night, Charlotte police officers shot and killed Michael Laney. Laney was handcuffed in police custody at the time of his murder. In nearly all mainstream coverage of this police execution, journalists have named Laney as an “armed robbery suspect,” because he was riding a red scooter apparently matching a description of one used in a robbery in the area the week before. Charlotte Observer makes a point of underlining the “precarity” of the officers’ situation (“They were in fear for their lives”), as if poor people of color everywhere in the United States (to say nothing of the state of affairs here in the United Kingdom and Europe) were not in a constant state of fearing-for-their-lives at the hands of a policy of institutionally racialized violence, in particular the systemic criminalization of Black bodies, who are always guilty, never to be proven innocent, the police execution itself serving as due enforcement of the law. “It just got to the point where the officer felt he had lost control of the situation,” [Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe] said [of Anthony Holzauer officer who killed Laney]. “We’re talking about a firearm. We very well could be here, talking about the loss of two officers.”

There is absolutely no mistaking the meaning of this comment: the life of a potentially dangerous Black man (and it must be understood that under the white supremacist police state, all Black men are potentially dangerous) is forfeit in the face of “the loss of two officers.” “Why didn’t they shoot him in the leg?” Laney’s nephew asks at the end of the article. Tina Laney, Michael Laney’s mother, replies: “I don’t know.” The state could not be clearer about which lives it determines to be valuable, worthy of the protection of the “law,” and which lives it deems always and absolutely killable, without impunity.

From Dion the Socialist:

First, we heard someone had been shot. This was my first thought anyway. I was kind of shaken up by the fact that I had literally missed being in the area of the shooting by about ten minutes. Then, the chatter we heard was that it was the police who shot someone. Still, I assumed they’d shot the perp they were looking for.

Some lady walked past us and said “yall look scared.” We asked her if she knew what happened. That’s when she told us that the kid was being chased by some people and the police were called to help him. Somehow, the police ended up shooting the kid. The police shot the victim when they were called to help him.

That’s when I first heard the brother yelling at the police. He was saying that they shot his brother and that his brother didn’t have a gun.The police shot him even though he was unarmed. That’s when the coroner’s truck showed up (I think) and I decided to blog it so I could keep up with what was happening. This is also when more of the kid’s family showed up. I’m assuming the kid was a teen because his older brother only looked about mid twenties. His mother was screaming and crying at this point, as well as a younger cousin of his. It was heartbreaking.

His brother had a gun at one point. That’s when Corbin and I went back to our car. The chatter was getting louder though so we got out again and got closer to where we could see the crime scene. I saw them load the body.

I was approached by two or three detectives who asked if I lived in the house I was standing in front of at the time. That’s when I told them where I lived and asked if we could get to our house. The brother came up to the detectives and started yelling about how “you’re not gonna get away with this” and “he was handcuffed when you shot him.”

“We’re not going to let you put us in handcuffs anymore. Why would anyone let you put them in handcuffs when this is what you do? You handcuff him and shoot him in the back of the head. If you want head shots, I can give you head shots. I can put something on your head.” Detectives sent me to my car at this point and told me I could drive through and get home. As I was walking, I heard him say “one of yall cuffed him, the other said ‘he’s got a gun’ and yall shot him in the back of his head.”

When I got home, I could still hear his mother crying and screaming.

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t listen to his mother crying anymore and his brother screaming.

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