“How many more lives are going to be lost in this kind of reckless activity? How many more young black lives are going to be lost?” Rex Elliott, an attorney for Lewis’ family, said Thursday at a news conference.
Lewis joined a growing list of black people killed in clashes with law enforcement in the city of nearly 900,000 people. Casey Goodson Jr., 23, was shot in 2020 while walking into his home, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was outside her foster home in 2021, and Andre Hill, 47, was walking toward an officer in 2020 while holding a lighted cellphone in his hand. Data collected by Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group that tracks police shootings in the United States, shows that at least 14 black people — mostly men — have been fatally shot by Columbus Police officers in the past five years. city ​​and county leaders pledged to address disparities facing people of color in many areas, including health, poverty, economic mobility, education, crime and food access, when they passed resolutions declaring racism a public health crisis in 2020 but criticism of Columbus police’s treatment of black residents and allegations of racism and discrimination within the ranks of the police department continue to fuel mistrust among the community. “There are good people in Columbus who know the problem is serious, but their knowledge of it doesn’t seem to be listening at all, and that’s very troubling,” said Wil Haygood, a journalist and biographer who chronicles the lives of Black Americans and who has written several books about life in Colombo. Haygood, a visiting scholar at Miami University in Ohio who grew up in Columbus, said black lives in the city have been marked by interactions with law enforcement for generations. Haygood remembers White police officers confronting protesters during racist demonstrations in 1968 and other times he was stopped by police for no apparent reason.
“I grew up not wanting to be around cops thinking they were out to hurt you,” he said. In 2018, according to police statistics, nearly 55% of CDP incidents of violence targeted Black people, who make up less than 29% of the city’s population. Sean Walton, an attorney representing the families of several black men killed by police in the city, began his career as a personal injury attorney but expanded his practice to civil rights lawsuits more than five years ago after meeting a family who was protesting the relative’s death outside the county courthouse. He filed his first lawsuit in 2016 and within a year took the cases of three other Black men killed by police at the time. Over the years, Walton says he’s seen how body cameras and cell phone videos have proven “what people living in Columbus have known for a long time.” “It’s not like the recent spate of shootings is a new development,” he said. The national attention in the wake of the police shootings and deaths “illuminated the country on the persistent police threat that black and brown people feel in our daily lives as citizens of Columbus,” Walton said. In recent years, there have been some changes, such as city officials admitting to systemic racism and an ongoing review by the U.S. Department of Justice of the Columbus Police Department, but activists, scholars and residents often believe that it is gradual, with “little to no urgency,” and without fully embracing community input. In recent days, several groups in the city described Lewis’ death as evidence of the “significant, ongoing harm perpetuated against Black people” at the hands of law enforcement and began organizing forums, prayers and protests to be held Friday and weekend. “Black people deserve to live in safety and peace and in thriving communities without the looming threat of state-sanctioned violence,” YWCA Columbus said in a statement.