What’s behind the increased violence against police officers?
Police killings
It was late June when David Clark, a man who worked as a security guard at an industrial park west of Tacoma, Washington, called 911. The call had been made early in the evening about “a large, dark vehicle blocking traffic,” Clark said. “It was coming down a major street, coming very fast, going really fast like that.”
According to a 911 call transcript, one officer responded that Clark was going to be “lucky to make it” from the scene before a second vehicle with two occupants “cut in,” said the transcript, which was obtained by The Intercept and later released.
A second officer who responded to Clark’s 911 call asked him to stay where he was and “check for any other officers,” Clark told the Washington Post.
Instead of running or escaping, the vehicle swerved around Clark, who was seated in his car. After a few moments, the driver accelerated toward Clark and opened fire. According to Clark’s account of what happened, the driver was attempting to hit the officer and Clark in the head while the car was moving.
Clark was later diagnosed with a concussion and taken to a hospital for treatment, where he remained for several days.
The shooting, which occurred on June 25, 2015, was the third police shooting in Tacoma since October 2014, in which three officers were killed. The other two victims were both black: Jeronimo Yanez, a 31-year-old father of two, and Breonna Taylor, 32, were both shot with automatic weapons while seated in their car.
The last such episode occurred on March 12, 2016, when the police officer who shot an unarmed man, Michael Brown, was acquitted of assault charges.
Two months later, on May 19, The Intercept and ProPublica published a detailed investigation, We Are Watching You: The Shooting of Michael Brown, a thorough report on the shooting of Brown and the