Boulder shooting inspires comparisons to police killing of Elijah McClain

Monday’s mass shooting at a supermarket Boulder, Colorado, the second in the US in the span of a week, not only shocked the nation and left 10 people dead, but has inspired reflections on the disparate ways police treat people suspected of violent crime due to their race.

Numerous commenters on social media argued that the gunman in the Colorado shooting, now suspected to be Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was able to be arrested without serious harm owing to his light skin.

Meanwhile, in a nearby area in 2019, police fatally stopped, frisked, choked, and injected Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, with ketamine while he was walking home, after a call about suspicious activity in the area.

A city review later found police had no basis to stop or detain Mr McClain, a massage therapist described by his family as “gentle” and who was not suspected of having committed a criminal offence.

Mr McClain, who was 5ft 6in and weighed 140 pounds, had been walking home after buying iced tea at a convenience store when someone called police to say he looked “sketchy”. He was wearing a balaclava, as he often did because he had anaemia. During a struggle as police tried to handcuff him he threw up and apologised, saying: “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to do that, I can’t breathe correctly.”

He told officers he was an “introvert” and asked them to respect his boundaries. One officer threatened to set a police dog on him.

He was twice put in a carotid hold, which can restrict blood to the brain. When paramedics turned up they injected him with ketamine, using a dose that would have knocked out a much larger man. Mr McClain died following a cardiac arrest in hospital three days later. A coroner’s report on the cause of his death was inconclusive.

While the local district attorney said there was not enough evidence to charge the three police officers involved, the police force banned the use of carotid holds. Last year Mr McClain’s family filed a civil lawsuit against the city.

In June 2020 three officers were fired from the force for taking selfies at the scene of Mr McClain’s death showing them mocking the chokehold he had been held in. One of those fired was one of the officers involved in his death – Jason Rosenblatt – who had been sent the selfie and responded “ha ha”.

While various studies, investigations, and journalistic projects have revealed the ways Black people are repeatedly singled out for police violence, the situation involving the arrest of the alleged killer at the King Soopers store in Boulder appears more nuanced.

The first complication relates to Mr Alissa’s identity. Depending on your definition, he might not be white. (Race, as opposed to ethnicity, is considered a social concept, not a biological one.) Boulder County district attorney Michael Dougherty alluded to Mr Alissa, 21, having an immigrant background, noting he had “lived most of his life in the United States.” The New York Times has also reported that a Facebook page, believed to belong to Mr Alissa, describes him as being born in Syria.

The second wrinkle is that he wasn’t arrested without incident. Video from the incident indeed captures him walking towards waiting officers in the hands of police and fire officials.

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But that was only after hundreds of officers arrived at the scene, and Mr Alissa was shot in the leg during a gun battle with police. Blood can be seen streaming from his leg in the arrest video.

That’s to take nothing away from Mr McClain’s death, which a review from the city of Aurora, Colorado, concluded was the result of an unlawful stop, and bore the hallmarks of racially biased policing, though it stopped short of concluding racism was a provable factor.

The scenario commenters are laying out did actually take place in 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, when police arrested James Holmes, who is white, without incident after he murdered 12 people in a movie theatre, for which he was sentenced to life in prison.