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2 Police Confrontations, 2 Very Different Outcomes
On the same day last week — Sunday, August 23 — two American men had violent encounters with police officers.
You’ve heard about one of them: Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is now paralyzed, after police shot him seven times in the back, while his three sons, aged three, five, and eight, watched. Blake had been trying to break up a fight and was walking back to the car where his kids were waiting.
The other, you probably haven’t heard about: Richard Grant Lees of Draper, Utah, reportedly fired an AR-15 at a police officer and then ran into a neighbor’s yard with his loaded weapon. Unlike the Kenosha officers, the Draper officer on the scene didn’t return fire, instead ducking for cover and verbally calling for Lees to drop his gun—partly out of concern for his nine-year-old son, who was standing nearby.
There’s another big difference between these two incidents, as the playwright David Valdes points out in a Medium post: Lees is White, while Blake is Black.
