Loreal Tsingine with her Daughter Tiffany.
Here’s hoping this investigation will result in some form of justice, rather than the usual lack of it. Unsurprisingly, the cop who killed Ms. Tsingine had a highly questionable character, but the Winslow cop shop took him on anyway.
The 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 March 27 shooting death of Loreal Tsingine, spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said.
Tsingine, 27, was shot and killed by the 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.
[…]
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 a question: “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.
I cannot be the only one who wants an answer as to why in the hell this person was hired in the first place, then why in the hell he was kept on, and why he was not red-flagged all over the damn place. What is the point of cops trying to do the right thing, when they are simply ignored? This is how cop shops get a well deserved reputation of being rotten to the core.
This is a photo of Shipley, wearing a three percenters shirt, which might go a long way to answering why Ms. Tsinginge is dead, and why Shipley is so damn trigger happy:
Austin Shipley, a three-year veteran of the Winslow Police Department, shot and killed Loreal Tsingine on Easter Sunday. Photo from Facebook. Source.
[…]
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 Americans killed in 2016, representing about 30% of the incidents in contrast to the rate among all racial groups, in which 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.
[…]
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.”
5 feet tall. 95 pounds. A pair of tiny medical bandage scissors. Two big ass cops, batons, pepper spray, tasers. And Ms. Tsingine ends up with 5 fucking bullets in her tiny body. How the fuck anyone could rule that justified, I do not know. Also, I’m thankful for The Guardian picking this story up, and getting word out. So, U.S. media, where the fuck are you?
GODDAMMIT. Every opportunity to stop this man from becoming an officer, to prevent his presence in the vicinity of Ms. Tsingine in any capacity of authority, and every single time, what? Excuses? Handwaving? Gross incompetence, negligence, denial, or was it enabling, agreement, the complicity of “pshaw, he doesn’t really mean it, white boys will be boys, just blowing off steam, saying what we all think, he just speaks his mind?” Of course they ruled it justified, to do otherwise would admit malicious incompetence on the part of the department in hiring and keeping him on, and it might mean they’d have to *gasp* fire or sanction some people with clout, people who matter.
Put them all under a microscope, the whole department, the training facility, all down the line. It won’t bring back Loreal Tsingine, it won’t give her child back her mother or heal her family’s grief, but it might prevent further irreparable damage to other families.
I wish I thought a good outcome from the investigation was likely. I hope, but.
Onamission5:
Exactly. There’s no other way to see the justification of this murder. I’m 6 inches taller than Ms. Tsingine, but just last month, I was weighing in at 95 lbs, and I can testify to just how easy it would have been for someone the size of these cops to put me down. There is no excuse whatsoever for what they did.
Yeah, me too.
Damn, that “three-percenter” shit is scary. That should be an immediate disqualification for any government position of authority.
Johnson catman @ 3:
I agree, especially if they are that open about it. Shipley is one big, walking red flag. Someone was going to die, sooner or later. I hope to fuck he never gets the chance to do it again, because he will.
Good luck to the Justice Department.
This is total system failure: if the police department (the fucking police department, best of the best, cream of every crop, as they like to be advertised!) can’t refuse employment to someone showing clear signs of incompetence and inadequacy with re: to the job requirements, the police department has a serious problem. As clear as the issue seems from here, I’m afraid I’m not expecting any decent result from this investigation.
@jason catman #3:
Silly me, here I thought I remembered a time when joining the government so that one could help take down the government or recruiting government employees for same-such was called treason. I guess they get away with it because they aren’t supposedly actively plotting, they’re just planning and hoping.