#SayHerName: Atatiana Jefferson

On October 12, 2019, twenty-eight-year-old Atatiana Jefferson was shot by police officer Aaron Dean in her own home. Jefferson’s murder is yet another case of unwarranted, lethal violence perpetrated by a white police officer against a black civilian — an injustice in and of itself that also further strains the already broken relationship between police officers and minority communities.

In the early hours of October 12, Aaron Dean and another officer responded to a nonemergency call made by Jefferson’s neighbor, who expressed concern that Jefferson’s door had been left open for hours. Police body-cam footage of the incident shows that the officers walked around Jefferson’s home before entering her backyard. They approached a closed window before one yelled, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” Almost immediately after, Dean fired his gun, killing Jefferson in front of her eight-year-old nephew, who she was taking care of at the time. 

Jefferson’s murder is similar to another case of police brutality that recently made headlines — the 2018 killing of Botham Jean. Jean, a twenty-six-year-old black man, was also murdered in his apartment by a police officer in Dallas. Officer Amber Guyger entered his home — purportedly thinking it was her own since she lived in the building — and killed an innocent man.

As much as we may try to remember, humanize, and celebrate the lives of victims of police brutality, the sad truth is that part of Jefferson’s legacy, and the legacy of all these victims will be their status as part of a growing, disturbing statistic of violence in America. The epidemic of mass shootings in this country is enough to make anybody think twice about leaving their homes, but for black people, even their homes offer no safety. For black people, calling the police is not the default response to violence that is for other communities; It is the last resort. 

Police kill black people at traffic stops, in parks, walking home, on the street, in their backyards, and, yes, in their own homes. Black people are far more likely to be shot by the police than their white counterparts and, according to Mapping Police Violence’s data, three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Twenty-one percent of black victims are unarmed, according to the same data, and there were only 23 days in 2018, where police did not kill anyone.

The possibility of ever having true police accountability and reforming law enforcement seems increasingly impossible with each civilian that is killed by members of these institutions. But even in the rare cases where successful legal action is taken against police malpractice, the policing of black communities generally doesn’t necessarily improve. “As police officers are transferred or sent to prison, new ones replace them, but the job description does not change,” Derecka Purnell recently wrote in The Guardian. “Thus, organizing around a single cop’s conviction misses the point that policing is problematic...This does not amount to increased safety for people of color.” 

And even when police officers are imprisoned, dread and loss still precipitate throughout the community. Their imprisonment doesn’t equate to justice. Police brutality rests on a cycle of trauma so deep that some question if justice will ever be possible.

As the hostility between black people and police escalates towards a fever pitch, two things are certain. First, despite the outcry that follows each tragedy, the death toll of black bodies will continue to rise if calls for police reform fail to be answered. Second, the black community’s patience for the utter lack of significant retribution will wear thin. The black community has no choice at this point but to continue to loudly remind everyone of these certainties, and hope that consequential change will be made before the name of the next victim of police violence becomes a headline.