HR1410 99TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR1410 LRB099 22481 MST 49906 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, Police in the United States killed approximately 102 unarmed black people in 2015, a rate of nearly two each week; nearly one in three black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed; and

WHEREAS, In 2015, 37% of unarmed people killed by police were black despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population; unarmed black people were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites in 2015; and

WHEREAS, Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 in which an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in criminal charges against the officer or officers involved, with only two convictions; and

WHEREAS, Police shootings of unarmed individuals are not a recent phenomenon; on February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was shot and killed by four New York City Police Department officers when they fired a combined total of 41 shots, 19 of which struck Diallo; and

WHEREAS, On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer; the disputed circumstances of the shooting further inflamed existing tensions in the predominantly black city, where protests and civil unrest erupted; the events received considerable attention in the U.S. and elsewhere and generated a debate about the relationship between law enforcement and African Americans; it also created a national dialogue about the use of force, concerns over insensitivity to the local community, and the militarized response of the police to the situation; and

WHEREAS, Laquan McDonald was killed in Chicago on October 20, 2014 when he was shot 16 times in 13 seconds by a Chicago police officer; video of the shooting shows that McDonald fell to the ground after the first shot was fired; the officer stopped firing for a moment, then opened fire again when McDonald moved; the officer was on the scene for less than 30 seconds before opening fire and began shooting approximately six seconds after exiting his car; another officer stated that he did not see the need to use force and none of the at least eight other officers on the scene fired their weapons; and

WHEREAS, On December 26, 2015, Quintonio LeGrier was shot six times by police after allegedly swinging a baseball bat at the officers when they responded to a 911 call he placed regarding his father; the shooting also left, 55-year-old Bettie Jones, who lived at the address, fatally wounded in what police labeled an accident; and

WHEREAS, Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old African-American woman, was fatally shot on March 21, 2012 in Chicago by an off-duty Chicago police detective; he approached a group of four people who were walking down an alley and admonished them for talking too loudly; the group turned to leave and the officer fired multiple shots into the group from inside his car, hitting Boyd in the back of the head killing her; the officer claimed that he mistook a cell phone for a handgun; and

WHEREAS, Although not shootings, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Freddie Gray all died in circumstances that seemed to have been unnecessarily escalated by police; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NINETY-NINTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we urge changes in the manner in which police officers are trained when dealing with the public; these changes should include (1) de-escalation - talking to and calming down agitated, weapon-wielding suspects and suspects who run away and then struggle when they are caught; (2) cultural sensitivity - police should take into account the perceptions minority groups (Black, Latino, Muslim) have of the police and how those perceptions may influence their actions; (3) community engagement - officers being aware of the character of a community so that everyone in a particular community is not treated like a potential lawbreaker.