What killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
Fantastic essay here about the death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones. She was shot by police filming a reality show--police who were violating procedure at every single level.
What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones? | Mother Jones
"You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered," Schmidt told me.
"What disease was that?" I asked.
"The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit," he said. "Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic."
WAS IT SO SIMPLE? Was it inevitable, as the doctor said, that abject poverty would lead to Aiyana's death and so many others? Was it death by TV? By police incompetence? By parental neglect? By civic malfeasance? About 350 people are murdered each year in Detroit. There are some 10,000 unsolved homicides dating back to 1960. Many are as fucked up and sad as Aiyana's. But I felt unraveling this one death could help diagnose what has gone wrong in this city, so I decided to retrace the events leading up to that pitiable moment on the porch on Lillibridge Street.
People my mother's age like to tell me about Detroit's good old days of soda fountains and shopping markets and lazy Saturday night drives. But the fact is Detroit and its suburbs were dying 40 years ago. The whole country knew it, and the whole country laughed. A bunch of lazy, uneducated blue-collar incompetents. The Rust Belt. Forget about it.
When I was a teenager, my mother owned a struggling little flower shop on the East Side, not far from where Aiyana was killed. On a hot afternoon around one Mother's Day, I was working in the back greenhouse. It was a sweatbox, and I went across the street to the liquor store for a soda pop. A small crowd of agitated black people was gathered on the sidewalk. The store bell jingled its little requiem as I pulled the door open.
. . .
