What a huge insult to families of people who have been murdered by cops in phoenix. Mayor phil gordon said some shit about how the people who get shot by cops are bad people and they deserve it, basically. An article by Colorlines magazine exposed some information about the high number of police shootings in the Phoenix metro area, which was disputed by the mayor, but was affirmed by Colorlines via the online publication called Barriozona.
You can view/hear phil gordan's commentary on Channel 12/azcentral. His words reflect not only his ignorance about many of the realities of these police shootings, but his own attitudes about police as infallible heros. Additionally, you can tell he doesn't care at all about the factors of race in this picture.
Barriozona contacted Alfredo DeAvila, Senior Program Associate for the Applied Research Center which publishes ColorLines.
“[Mayor Gordon] was thinking that we did not take into consideration national information from the FBI. In all this national investigation that we’ve done, we found out that the FBI’s information is information and data that the City itself submits to them... So when we made the investigation, we looked at newspapers, information that is reported in the news. We went ahead and looked at different types of information. What we have found out is that almost everywhere, the FBI’s information is not accurate; it is lacking a lot of data that has been simply reported in the news.â€
The article, entitled "Why So High" found that "Phoenix had the highest rate of fatal police shootings from 2000 to 2005 among the 10 U.S. cities with more than one million people, according to federal data." The article also stated that, "Among the 27 cities with more than 250,000 people that tracked victims’ ethnicities during this time, 23 out of 137, or one in six, Hispanic victims of police shootings were killed in Phoenix, although Phoenix had just 6 percent of the total population." There were various important facts given in the article that no other publication locally would both care about and be able to research as well. Please check out the article here.
