‘Shot from behind’: man’s death reveals hidden horror of Latino police killings
*[tweet_dis]Of the 67 Latinos killed in police shootings this year, 25 percent were unarmed.[/tweet_dis] VL
By Oliver Laughland, The Guardian
Outside the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco’s Mission district, a newly painted mural glows in the afternoon sun. Two of the men etched on the wall are instantly recognisable: to the right stands Eric Garner, the unarmed black man killed by police in New York City; Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, stands to the left. But framed in the middle is a face hardly anyone from beyond the streets of this historically working class area would have ever noticed.
[pullquote]Amilcar Perez-Lopez was 20 years old when he was shot dead by two plain-clothed San Francisco police officers in February.[/pullquote] [tweet_dis]Amilcar Perez-Lopez was 20 years old when he was shot dead by two plain-clothed San Francisco police officers in February.[/tweet_dis] An undocumented migrant and Guatemalan national, he is pictured at the bottom of the mural, his hands up, clutching a copy of Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide.He was killed two blocks away from the mural. The gallery’s owners heard the gunshots go off.
[tweet_dis]Perez-Lopez was one of the 67 Latino people identified by the Guardian as killed by police so far this year.[/tweet_dis] Like 58% of them, he carried no firearm; 25% were completely unarmed. Yet his death and those of all the other Latino 67 have failed to spark the kind of outrage seen after the deaths of Garner and Brown. Those who witnessed the event – also undocumented migrants – have been “driven underground”, lawyers tell the Guardian.Indeed, in five cases of Latino deaths identified by the Guardian’s investigative accounting of law enforcement-related deaths in the US this year, media reporting failed to even document the individual’s name.
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[Photo courtesy IndyBay]
