Wesley Lowery: They can't kill us all

For the two years since Ferguson, it had been more or less my job to bear witness to pain and trauma. Once you're known as a reporter who covers policing and justice, your email accounts and voice mail boxes become depositories of death: pleading messages from mothers and windows of those who have been killed by officers who beg you to tell their story. Envelopes from inmates stuffed with legal filings and police reports arrived at work addressed to me. As hard as it is to be in receipt of so much rightful pain and sorrow, video of shootings, Tasings, arrests, and beatings is different. There is no way to filter it. The only way to decide what to cover is to watch them all.

To date, the hardest video for me to watch had been the extended version of Tamir Rice's death, in which his sister frantically raced to his body, only to be tackled by officers. But even that video hadn't brought me to tears. The video feed of Diamond Reynolds, Castile' girlfriends, was different.

“Fuck! I told him not to reach for it, I told him to get his hand out!” the officer screams at Reynolds.

“You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver's license,” she insists in response. “Oh my God, please don't tell me he's dead. Please don't tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”

Responding officers eventually removed Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter from the car where Castile was dying. In the video, as they take her into custody, Reynolds, who up until this point has been unbelievably composed, begins to lose herself to what has just happened. She cries, and then she prays. She pleads with Jesus, a broken woman begging for divine intervention. As Reynolds then begins to scream, her four-year-old daughter interjects, “It's okay, I'm right with you.”
 
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Wesley Lowery at the 27. PWF:

Sunday, 12 November - 16:00 - reading, 19:30 - conversation

Monday, 13 November - 19:30 - conversation The Fire Next Time

Tuesday, 14 November - talk: Black Lives Matter

Tickets