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<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Black Woman
Shot Dead By Police: Where Is National Outcry?</h1>
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<div class="field-item even">Aura Rosser's death has gone
nearly unnoticed. Do male black lives matter more than
female?</div>
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<div class="byline rights"> <em>By</em> <em><a
href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/terrell-jermaine-starr-0">Terrell
Jermaine Starr</a></em> / <span class="field
field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference
field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span
class="field-item even"><a href="http://alternet.org">AlterNet</a><br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/black-woman-was-shot-dead-police-wheres-national-outcry#.VLSmNfBuTuI.facebook">http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/black-woman-was-shot-dead-police-wheres-national-outcry#.VLSmNfBuTuI.facebook</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</span></span></span> </div>
<div class="story-date"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date
field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span
class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single"
property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2015-01-12T10:05:00-08:00">January 12, 2015</span></span></span></span>
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<p>The day before Aura Rosser was shot and killed by Officer David
Reid of the Ann Arbor Police Department in November, she was on
the phone making plans for the holidays with her sister, Shae
Ward. They were considering cruise destinations far from the
frigid Michigan weather that was bound to arrive in December:
Florida Keys, the Bahamas, anywhere south. They communicated
throughout the day on social media, but that phone call was the
last time Ward heard Rosser’s voice.</p>
<p>The next day, Officer Reid and his partner, Mark Raab, responded
to a domestic disturbance call around 11:45pm at the home of Aura
Rosser, 40, and her boyfriend, Victor Stephens, 54, in Ann Arbor,
home of the University of Michigan and a liberal bastion about an
hour from Detroit.</p>
<p>What happened after the officers arrived is unclear. Stephens has
said he and Rosser were in a heated argument when he made the
call, <a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/witness_in_ann_arbor_police_sh.html"
target="_blank">according to local reports</a>. He says he
called the cops to escort Rosser out of his home. When officers
arrived, they claim Rosser "<a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/12/ann_arbor_police_release_name_2.html#incart_story_package"
target="_blank">confronted</a>" them with a knife. Officer Reid
shot Rosser, killing her. <a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/ann_arbor_police_shooting_name.html"
target="_blank">Michigan State Police</a> say Rosser was shot
once but declined to say where. Stephens said she was shot twice;
once in the head and once in the chest. "Why would you kill her?"
Stephens said to local news outlet MLive a day after the shooting.
"It was a woman with a knife. It doesn't make any sense."</p>
<p>It was the first police shooting in Ann Arbor since the ‘80s,
police officials say. But amidst national outcry about the police
killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, it barely registered a
blip. Ann Arbor police have gone on record to defend the officers’
actions, but many residents are suspicious of the cops’ version of
events. On December 14, <a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/12/ann_arbor_protesters_call_for.html#incart_story_package"
target="_blank">more than 200</a> protesters marched down Fifth
Avenue in downtown Ann Arbor to protest the slow pace of the
investigation into the shooting. Many were holding signs reading,
“Black Lives Matter” and “White silence = white consent.” </p>
<p>The officers involved in the shooting have been placed on leave
pending the investigation, which is slated to release its findings
this week. Aura Rosser has been dead two months and apart from a
few Huffington Post pieces, no national outlets have covered her
shooting. </p>
<p>There are no reliable numbers of how many black women and girls
are killed by police, but none of their deaths have sparked
collective national outcry. It is not that people don’t care about
them. Local activists took to the streets of Chicago to protest
the killing of unarmed Rekia Boyd. Detroiters demanded justice for
7-year-old Aiyana Jones after she died from a gunshot fired during
a botched Special Response team operation at the home she was
sleeping in at the time. But not a single national protest
followed.</p>
<p>Shirley Beckley, who was born and raised in Ann Arbor, helped to
organize the December march and is working with other activists in
the city to raise money for Rosser’s three children. “I think it’s
important that [Rosser's story] go national because all of these
killings of these men,” Beckley told AlterNet, “and now we have
had a killing of this black woman.“</p>
<p>Where’s the outrage? It is almost as if the collective
consciousness figured that their lives weren’t important enough to
cover.</p>
<p>Kirsten West Savali <a
href="http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/08/18/black-women-are-killed-police-too"
target="_blank">explains in Dame Magazine</a> that, too often,
black <em>people </em>become black<em> men </em>by default. She
quoted Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of women’s studies
at Ohio State University, who said that such a gender-exclusive
narrative tends to dominate conversations of violence against
black people.</p>
<p>"Both historically and contemporarily, when many people working
towards racial justice around the issue of racial violence, the
presumptive victim is a black male," Lindsey told Dame. "From
lynching to police brutality, the presumed victim is a black male.
Therefore, black women and girls are viewed as exceptional victims
as opposed to perpetual victims of anti-black racial violence. Our
narratives around racial violence, unfortunately, have yet to
evolve into ones that are gender inclusive. Black victim = black
male.”</p>
<p>There seems to be a protective guard over the dignity of black
men that is never afforded to black women like Rosser. The New
York Times <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/us/if-they-gunned-me-down-protest-on-twitter.html?_r=0"
target="_blank">wrote a feature</a> highlighting #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.
The viral hashtag was a response to media outlets using photos of
Michael Brown posing in positions that suggest he was a criminal.
Those same outlets ended up switching the photos in response.
While the hashtag was an important act of social media activism,
black women killed by cops rarely, if ever, receive the same
treatment.</p>
<p>There was no reaction hashtag for Rosser when a <a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/ann_arbor_police_shooting_name.html"
target="_blank">local report</a> detailed her drug history and
petty criminal record. An <a
href="http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/11/house_where_ann_arbor_police_s.html#incart_story_package"
target="_blank">MLive report states</a> that cops were called to
the home several times for “domestic disturbances” involving
Rosser and Stephens. The article cited reports that “indicate
crack cocaine was being smoked in the house.” Notably, five other
people were said to be in the house when Rosser was shot, and none
has spoken publicly. After making initial statements to the press,
boyfriend Stephens has reportedly retained a lawyer and stopped
talking to the press.</p>
<p>But Shae Ward, the sister who was planning a vacation with Rosser
the night before she was killed, wants to talk about Rosser, in
part to counter the impression left by articles Ward feels dragged
her sister's name through the mud. She admits her sister had
issues with drug abuse, but fears publishing those details will
strip Rosser of her humanity and suggest her death was justified.</p>
<p>“I didn’t think her past mistakes should have been relevant,” she
said. “What’s relevant is why this officer used this kind of force
and what happened. I want to know more about the actual facts.”</p>
<p>There are many unanswered questions about those facts. How close
was Rosser to the officers when she supposedly confronted them
with a knife? How quickly did they resort to shooting her? Ward
also questions the story of Rosser wielding a knife in the face of
armed police officers. Rosser was not a violent person, Ward says,
and if she had a knife in her hands, Ward thought it likely she
might have been cooking, something she did in times of stress. "I
would love to hear that officer say what he was smelling in the
kitchen,” she said. </p>
<p>Ward and Rosser are not blood relatives. According to Ward, they
met in foster care at St. Vincent Catholic Charities Home during
the late 1980s. Ward was born and raised in Flint, Mich., and
Rosser was the big city girl from Detroit. They considered
themselves sisters ever since their days at St. Vincent.</p>
<p>There was a funeral for Rosser on November 24 at Greater Grace
Temple City of David, in Detroit, which was organized by her blood
relatives. Rosser’s friends held a separate memorial on November
29 at Palmer Park.</p>
<p>“She loved that park in the ‘90s,” Ward said. “She loved the
connection to the earth, the aura around that area and the energy
of the people who were there.”</p>
<p>When Rosser wasn’t in the park, she was in the kitchen. Ward
remembers one of Rosser’s best dishes was pot roast.</p>
<p>“She didn’t like plantation food,” Ward said, laughing about
Rosser’s lectures on unhealthy African-American dishes with roots
connected to slavery. “Don’t have that stuff in her kitchen:
Chitterlings, neckbones, ham hocks, pig’s feet. She’d say, ‘We
have been freed from that, so we didn’t have to go back to eating
that and we should have never been eating it in the first place.”</p>
<p>That brief burst of laughter was one of the few times Ward broke
her mournful tone during our interview. “I have to get through the
day with just my set of eyes and not hers,” she said. “That’s been
my challenge since her murder. The fact that I am alone and I’ve
always had her. That is what I would like Officer Reid to
understand. She was my community. She was my world.”</p>
<p>Three weeks before Rosser’s death, activist Shirley Beckley said
she attended a meeting called <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1603482063212461/"
target="_blank">Lessons From Ferguson</a> at the Church of the
Good Shepherd, United Church of Christ where she said police
officials, including the police chief, vowed not to behave in the
same manner as law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old
Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson.</p>
<p>“What they were saying is that we would handle things differently
here in Ann Arbor if we had a Ferguson here," Beckley says. “But
they didn’t.”</p>
<p>Ann Arbor police declined to speak about the case when AlterNet
asked about the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation by
Michigan State Police. AlterNet left a message with the Michigan
State Police but they have yet to respond.</p>
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