Police Shootings and Native Americans

Hosts Sonia Martinez and Corine Fairbanks with special guests Lisa Bonita whose husband was shot by Sparks Nevada Police and family members of Zachary Bearheels who was shot in Omaha Nebraska by police.   Police officers in killings of native people are often not even charged with murder and even if they are charged are not convicted.  

Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet rarely do these deaths gain the national spotlight. For every 1 million Native Americans, an average of 2.9 of them died annually from 1999 to 2015 as a result of a "legal intervention," according to a CNN review of CDC data broken down by race. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings. But a few were attributed to other causes, including manhandling. That mortality rate is 12% higher than for African-Americans and three times the rate of whites.