“It’s a lower-income area, but at the end of the day there’s not a lot of criminal activity for them to be here the way they are,” Curtis Hall, a resident of the same neighborhood where Jefferson was fatally shot, said.
Hall, who is black, said he reported a break-in at his home about a decade ago. Two officers came the next day to his house while he was sitting in his car in his driveway with his children in the yard. They ran across his yard with guns pointed them at him and shouted conflicting orders of “Freeze” and “Show me your ID.”“I went to jail that day for inciting a public disturbance,” Hall said.
Jefferson’s death comes months after that of Botham Jean, 26, who was shot by his neighbor, former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger, in September after she mistook his apartment for her own.. For some, her conviction appeared to be a step toward greater accountability for police and a start toward restoring faith in the criminal justice system.
A few miles away in downtown Fort Worth, Cory Gray, 34, a pharmacy student who is African American, said he was unaware of the Jefferson case. But after hearing details, Gray said,"he's probably going to get off for it." Jefferson's death follows tumult at the Fort Worth Police Department and a spate of police-involved shootings.after less than four years as the head of the the department, which has about 1,700 officers.
So far this year, there have been nine officer-involved shootings with six of them turning fatal, according to Fort Worth police. All six of those occurred after June 1, including the shooting of Jefferson. All but two of those people involved in police shootings were either black or Latino.
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