While the aclu plaintiffs stories weren t violent, those men stood up because they know that those same situations can end up in violence. take the story of maria hamilton s son dontre. and i feel his spirit in here. i very seldom go to the cemetery because dontre s blood and life is in this park. in 2014 the manager of this starbucks called police on 31-year-old dontre who was waiting for his brother on a park bench. the police were actually called on three occasions. the first time they went and spoke with him, they came to the conclusion that he wasn t doing anything wrong, he wasn t bothering anybody, and so they left. unsatisfied with the response to her calls, the manager called a personal friend on the force to the scene. officer christopher manny. officer manny confronted dontre, who was unarmed and hadn t been bothering anybody. he stood over dontre s head.
Milwaukee police said dontre had a prior history of arrests and they claimed the arrests were directly connected to dontre s mental health issue. was any of that none of it s true. dontre hadn t robbed nobody. but dontre in 2016 was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. and dontre never tried to hurt anybody there s an assumption that everybody with mental health issues can turn violent. right. that s not the case overwhelmingly. no, it s not. the bigger question here is why are the cops the first responders to so many things that don t involve crime? too often the presence of police criminalizes people who may just be hanging out on a park bench or just having a bad day or may just be in crisis. in 2017 mental illness was a factor in 25% of police shootings. this was a couple of weeks before he died. wow. you know, the thing i noticed in all these pictures, he s smiling. that was his uniqueness.
Dontre was startled, jumped up, and he tried to do an illegal pat-down, and dontre resisted. officer manny unloaded 14 bullets into dontre, killing him. and again, dontre hadn t been bothering anyone, even according to other cops who d been on the scene. and his life was taken for that. because of a manager at starbucks profiling him as a homeless man and felt as though his presence stopped them from making money? mm. warranted 14 bullets? in broad daylight. whoo. thank you. following the shooting the
Dontre smiled all the time. and when his life was taken from us, we didn t know what to do. adding to maria s grief, the police didn t even file charges against the officer. they said his use of deadly force, 14 shots into dontre, was justifiable. we ve heard that way too many times before. it was like, am i in a movie? my fight even to this day is the truth. all i ever wanted was the truth. so i was poising for a fight, trying to get the truth. whenever a black youth or a black person is murdered by a police officer, often we see the moms step up. if we don t save our babies, they re not going to save us. maria and the others of eric garner, trayvon martin, jordan davis, michael brown, sandra