Who will raise their voice for Amelia Baca?

After its release in May, bodycam footage showing a police officer killing an elderly Latina slowly made the rounds on social media. Where you didn’t see this story was on the front pages of national news or discussed in morning roundtables.

On April 16th, a Las Cruces, New Mexico officer shot 75-year-old Amelia Baca twice, in the chest. One of her daughters had called 911, saying that she needed “an officer or an ambulance or someone.” Baca, who suffers from mental health issues and possibly dementia, had a knife in each hand.

As the full bodycam footage shows, relatives exited the home at the arriving officer’s instruction, with one of them heard telling him “please be very careful with her.” Seconds later, the officer, Jared Cosper, began yelling “Drop the f-cking knife!” as he pointed his gun at her. She takes a step towards him and he fires.

A nine-year veteran of the force, Cosper had received crisis training, but didn’t attempt to de-escalate the situation, as seen in the video. In response to the call from Baca’s daughter, the Las Cruces Police Department (LCPD) did not send their crisis intervention team and did not respond to questions from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. In the video, Cosper yells in English. Baca understood Spanish.

Baca had immigrated to the United States when she was in her 30’s. She worked at different jobs, including in the fields, to buy a home. A small horseshoe —an amulet for good luck and to prevent misfortune—hung above the doorway where she was killed.

“...rather than render aid to Ms. Baca, the officer who just shot her ordered another officer to drag her out of her house”

The killing of this great-grandmother gets familiarly worse. Sam Bregman, an attorney for the family, said that the video shows that Baca took a step forward in response to a gesture the officer made with his left hand. At a May 12th press conference with her family, Bregman also said that she was still alive on the ground but that “rather than render aid to Ms. Baca, the officer who just shot her ordered another officer to drag her out of her house.” Baca’s family wept as the bodycam video rolled.

New Mexico journalists have pointed out the lack of transparency around this and other cases of police violence. The LCPD all this time refused to disclose the officer’s name, which was revealed in a story last week by Las Cruces Sun-News reporter Justin García. Local media were only made aware of the shooting when the Baca family brought it to their attention, versus an official police statement. The City in the days after Baca was killed did, however, muster the effort to release selective bodycam images in a produced, narrated video that emphasized Baca was holding knives. As García observed in a podcast, the narrator says that Baca “never complies,” suggesting that the shooting was justified.

In the age of rampant domestic gun terrorism, the difference between police responding to a struggling Latina elder or now yet another Black man, Jayland Walker, versus mass murderers with assault weapons is glaring.

Baca’s family is calling on District Attorney Gerald Byers to press charges and has filed suits in both state and federal courts for the alleged violation of her rights.

Criminal charges, as with so many cases of police killings and violence, are an uphill battle. The Doña Ana County Officer-Involved Incident Task Force that investigated the shooting of Baca is predictably composed of law enforcement officials, including from the LCPD. The task force concluded its investigation last month and now the DA has to determine whether it will prosecute. “This is not an easy 'yes' or 'no',” said a spokesperson for the DA’s office.

A long history of violence

Police violence against Latinas and Latinos is far from some rare event. Hispanics are killed at a disproportionate rate by police, according to the Washington Post database on fatal police shootings since 2015 to the present. In Los Angeles alone, Latinos have been 67% of the victims of fatal police shootings.

Violence by some law enforcement officers against Latinos takes on other forms, particularly with women. Officers have used the vulnerability and presumed silence of undocumented Latinas and other women of color to sexually assault them. In 2015, an Oklahoma officer was convicted of raping and sexually assaulting eight Black women. In these cases of sexual violence against Latinas and Black women, predatorial officers targeted those most pushed to the fringes of the economy.

Elected and local leaders are supposed to be at the front of a community’s defense against police abuse. Yet, in searches for publicly-issued statements on the Baca case, nothing appears to be on the record except for one by the ACLU-NM. Bregman said that he had not seen any released. No larger press conferences or rallies have taken place. This kind of mobilization matters for wider coverage and building public pressure for accountability. It’s also critical considering the failure by some news media and leaders to frame Latinos within racist U.S. law enforcement violence and the continued over-policing of them.

“What most people don't know is that excessive force and police shootings have been reported in the Latino community for decades, going back to the 19th century when Mexicans were lynched by law enforcement in the West and Southwest,” wrote Michelle García in a 2015 piece for Cosmo for Latinas.

An agenda of white economic and political domination was the impetus for this violence. “Politicians and the media and local residents described Mexicans, regardless of their citizenship, as violent people, as a threat to the nation and people who needed to be violently policed,” explained University of Texas at Austin Professor Monica Muñoz Martinez in an interview with The Guardian.

The perpetrators of lynchings and other racial terror against Mexicans included the Texas Rangers, romanticized as honorable law-upholding white Americans in shows and films. The reality is they operated as death squads. In the 1930's, the Rangers were re-organized as Texas' official Department of Public Safety.

This foundation and context are key to understanding that a white supremacist slaughtering 22 Tejanos in El Paso —the closest major city to Las Cruces—, the decision to cage Brown children at the border, and police profiling Latino drivers in Arizona are not shocking detours from an imagined norm of fairness but instead part of a long, violent, state-approved operating system of anti Mexican and Latino violence. This vast local-to-border "public safety” complex in the southwest, supported with a massive federal budget, left Brown children as sitting ducks in Uvalde.

Challenges for bringing Latino cases to the forefront

“We are trying to change that narrative to show that the criminal legal system, policing, and mass incarceration are another form of oppression of our community”

García captures where the placement of Hispanics outside of historical and systemic racial violence leaves Latinas like Baca: “Assault on her, in essence, is rarely perceived as an assault on the nation, justice and equality.”

This is internalized by some Latinos. Lourdes Rosado, president of the civil rights institution LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said that part of the challenge within and outside of the Latino community is the ingrained belief that law enforcement authorities are in the right and people who come into contact with them are in the wrong, versus seeing the way Hispanics are policed as a systemic issue. “We are trying to change that narrative to show that the criminal legal system, policing, and mass incarceration are another form of oppression of our community, a way to really dampen the power that should come with our increasing numbers,” Rosado said. “A lot of Latinos are victims of the system because police over-police them.”

More issues complicate the ability to push back on police violence. Located in southern New Mexico, Las Cruces is left out of major media markets that encompass cities like Albuquerque in the north of the state. While not a red area, some of its residents lean conservative. And even leaders with progressive positions can be hesitant to speak out against police, especially during electoral cycles.

State Representative Angelica Rubio, whose district includes Las Cruces, says the “back the blue” sentiment is present and also raised that further complicating the situation is that Latinos are among border enforcement and local police, and how this can blur state violence being seen as racialized.

“...we have invested all this money in law enforcement and yet it only took 38 seconds for Amelia to be shot and killed”

As with many communities across the country, Rubio said there is frustration and fatigue amid a barrage of assaults and issues. The killing of Baca comes after Las Cruces recently settled a $6.5 million suit for the fatal police chokehold of Antonio Valenzuela in 2020. Rubio said that while there was a lot of public pressure around the Valenzuela case and changes implemented, she questions the results. The City, she said, will talk about its crisis intervention training and that the main solution is to have well-trained police officers, “except that we have invested all this money in law enforcement and yet it only took 38 seconds for Amelia to be shot and killed by police officers.”

She emphasized the need for more investment in mental health services versus what’s poured into law enforcement.

At the Baca press conference, Bregman, who also represented the Valenzuela family, talked about the need for police accountability. But with Latinos increasingly criminalized, President Biden introducing an executive order after Congress failed to pass comprehensive police reform following the murder of George Floyd, and the limitations of that approach for countering white supremacist state violence, it’s going to take more than legal action to prevent the deaths of Latinas like Baca, who should have been living out her golden years.

Bregman hopes more national attention will surge. Amelia’s “life is just as important as anyone else’s.”

For this to happen, a question raised by columnist Gustavo Arrellano about the level of attention that Latino deaths receive should be considered: “If more Latinos can’t be motivated to care, how can we expect the rest of society to care?”