Kids Corner

Current Events

Many Other Police Shootings Beg Close Scrutiny:
Sikh-American Was Killed In Similar, Questionable Circumstances

RAHULDEEP SINGH GILL

 

 

 



Police use of deadly force is not just an issue that needs to be addressed in New York, Ferguson, Missouri, and other parts of urban America.

Parminder Singh Shergill was a Sikh-American who served proudly in the first Gulf War only to fall to 14 unwarranted police bullets in his hometown of Lodi (San Joaquin County, California) last January.

A few days ago, after almost a year of investigation, the San Joaquin County district attorney’s office cleared the two officers who shot Parminder of any criminal wrongdoing in the fatal incident.

Suffering from schizophrenia, Parminder had left his house after his family called the police because he was hallucinating and needed mental health treatment. Two officers followed him as he walked to a local park, demanded that he stop and talk with them, and then followed him back toward his home.

The police say he lunged at them with a tactical knife, but neighbors who witnessed the interaction report no such event and cannot understand why the police resorted to deadly force.

Lethal force cannot be the only option in such cases. When the people who need police help the most also trust police the least, we are all less safe. We can sympathize with the officers in the case while still demanding more from them.

“We did not ask for them to come and shoot him,” Parminder’s sister Kulbinder Kaur Sohota told the media after the killing. “That was a nightmare for us. We wish we never called.”

According to lawyer Mark Merin, who is overseeing a civil rights complaint against the police, the Lodi police chief immediately asserted no wrongdoing by his officers and has maintained that position unquestioningly. Parminder’s family intends to pursue a federal civil rights case.

Why did Parminder get shot? Because he was a member of a minority group? Or because he was mentally ill? In the heat of the moment, visual difference may have been a strong factor.

Parminder was a tall man of color in rural America. Many of us who look different are perceived to be a threat by our appearance alone, even by the officials who are charged with protecting us.

Because he was mentally ill, Parminder did not respond to authorities in a way another person might have. The police treated him as a simple case of non-compliance and killed him. Being a minority veteran with mental illness in rural America certainly didn’t help him.

More and more, people who look and act different from the mainstream are moving beyond the limits of American metropolis. Has the leadership of these smaller police forces made their officers aware of diversity in their communities?

Do these smaller police forces undergo crisis intervention training so they know how to interact with mentally ill individuals? Do they know how to deal with hallucinating citizens?

It is not responsible to put officers in these situations without the proper preparation. Crisis intervention training must be standardized and implemented for police across the country. Moreover, we must demand that our police are well practiced in the use of non-lethal weapons.

The Lodi police will want you to know that they had made several previous trips to deal with Parminder. He even had been arrested previously, and police have produced a knife from that fatal incident. But none of this diminishes the necessity for better police protocol.

We must demand that police departments release all details of officer-related shootings before adjudication. As of now, according to Politico, they are not required to submit any data on what they consider “justifiable” homicides by officers to any national database.

Parminder’s death provides another sad example of systemic police excess and disregard for life, especially the lives of minorities and the mentally ill. When even those who risk their lives in the armed forces in the name of our freedom find no such freedom at home, there is a deep problem that needs to be resolved.


The author is the Director of the Center for Equality and Justice at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, California, USA.

[Courtesy: SF Gate. Edited for sikhchic.com]
January 7, 2015

 

Conversation about this article

1: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), January 07, 2015, 8:39 PM.

Unfortunately mental health issues need funding urgently and police forces need all their officers to be educated on disabling their suspects rather than using deadly force and educated not to discriminate on the grounds of colour or stereotypes.

2: R P Singh (Palo Alto, California, USA), January 09, 2015, 3:07 AM.

I am curious as to why it took sikhchic.com so long to pay attention to Parminder's death? [EDITOR: Simple. Because it took so long for someone in the community to write a well-thought-out piece, articulate, focused and in intelligible English, on this tragedy ...]

Comment on "Many Other Police Shootings Beg Close Scrutiny:
Sikh-American Was Killed In Similar, Questionable Circumstances"









To help us distinguish between comments submitted by individuals and those automatically entered by software robots, please complete the following.

Please note: your email address will not be shown on the site, this is for contact and follow-up purposes only. All information will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Sikhchic reserves the right to edit or remove content at any time.