When being shot by police is a suicide

Concerning decision has been made in the inquest of the police murder of Beau Baker.

Classical depiction of suicide by Roman Soldiers

There’s this story that I haven’t stopped thinking about for the past four or so days.

Imagine this: you are in crisis. You are standing outside of your apartment. You are holding a knife and, in the throws of your crisis, you are threatening to stab people who come near you.

Someone calls the police. You see police and an ambulence pull up to your apartment. They come towards you, armed with their guns, asking what you have in your hand. As if it isn’t obvious. As if it isn’t a cry for help. You are smarter than these cops and they are playing games with you. So, when Staff Sargeant Eric Boynton (2022 salary: $155,977) asks you what object is glistening in your hands, you respond with a stabbing motion. Shouldn’t it be obvious? Is this guy an idiot or is he testing you? They’re here because you have a knife and you were threatening to stab people. Why is this asshole playing games?

You’re 20 years old. You’re scared. You’re thinking nothing that makes sense. And as you walk towards the police officer, Eric Boynton shoots you dead.

Your family will have to wait eight years before they find out what happened that night. Your death will be the subject of a coroner’s inquiry that will wrap up almost eight years to the day of your murder.

And the jury will read the facts and decide that you died by suicide.

That’s right, you died by your own hand. Your death was an intentional, self-inflicted act. A jury has decided to exonerate the police not just by saying that the shooting was justified but that the shooter was actually you: you shot yourself. Eric Boynton was just the external manifestation of your internal desires. Maybe you should thank him rather than haunt him.

You can read CTV’s report into this here.

Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as “suicide by cop.” We don’t even call medical assistance in dying “suicide by medical professional.” You are either killed by someone else or killed by your own hand, regardless of how threatened a police officer feels about you.

This is a term that is used specifically by law enforcement, which is why I think that it’s better understood as a kind of copaganda. Remixing a police shooting (and let’s be generous, maybe the officer’s life was in danger and, because we privilege the lives of police over the lives of people in mental health crisis, society believes that it might be justified for the officer to shoot to kill), into a suicide is copaganda. Because otherwise, at best, it’s self defense. At its most generous.

In an article written in 2013, CBC asks if “suicide by cop” is a growing phenomenon. To illustrate this question, they use the murder of Corey Lewis, a man who police shot while holding an umbrella that had been duct taped to his hands. They thought that he might kill them with this umbrella. This is suicide by cop.

An article published by the US Department of Justice on the phenomenon called “suicide by cop” says this:

Although there is little systematic evidence of this phenomenon, there is anecdotal data of a growing number of justifiable homicides in which police officers have shot an apparently armed individual, only to find out later that the circumstances were victim-precipitated.

It makes sense that there would mostly be anecdotal evidence of this. Suicide by cop is pure copaganda: it absolves the shooter of his responsibility to keep someone alive and instead legitimizes giving the role of judge, jury and executioner to the police officer who does the shooting. There’s no way to scrutinize the claim that someone who is in crisis is looking to commit suicide, certainly not if they don’t actually commit suicide, and the thing about intentions to commit suicide is this: they often go away, especially if someone lives through the crisis.

I have been scandalized by how little attention this story has gotten. It seems like a very worrying decision that might be invoked to justify other so-called officer-involved shooters. It’s such an easy out for accountability: in what other trials does the suspect have so little ability to explain what was going through his mind? He’s dead. Let the ones who murdered him speak on his behalf.

I hope that the family of Beau Baker can move on now that the inquiry is finished, even if the jury’s decision is wrong. But make no mistake: police offices were celebrating in the wake of this decision. They were doing it quietly, but they were celebrating.

Finally, they have proof that average people will accept that someone who faces a cop while they are in mental distress was asking for the cop to shoot and kill him.

Any time someone calls police because someone is in distress, this could be their fate.