How to explain the difference?

On Jan. 4, a Lima police SWAT team raid left a mother of six shot dead. Police broke into the home of Tarika Wilson, 26, to carry out a drug raid against her boyfriend, Anthony Terry, who since has pleaded to charges and is off to prison. Per the “wisdom” dispensed in some opinion pieces and over the airwaves, Wilson’s death was her own fault. Put yourself in the wrong situation, the “logic” goes, and you own the results.

Not four months later, on the night of April 29, a drive-by shooting killed a 38-year-old mother of three, Wendy Westergaard, on West Market Street. Police last week said it’s possible Westergaard let a dealer use her vehicle in exchange for drugs. The shooter — still unidentified — might have recognized Westergaard’s Jeep Cherokee, killing Westergaard only because she was in it.

No one has blamed Westergaard for her own death at someone else’s hands.

“She had some problems in her life regarding drugs, but she certainly didn’t deserve to lose her life over it,” Lima Police Department Detective Don Marik said.

Did he mean Westergaard or Wilson?

Few in the white community have been able to draw that parallel. Today being Mother’s Day and nine Lima children being without theirs, maybe we should consider possible reasons for the different reactions:

• Perhaps it’s location. We accept — even expect — bad things happening in south Lima. We tell ourselves that’s where the majority of the city’s problems occur. But West Market Street, practically in front of St. Rita’s Medical Center, blocks from the boulevard? Bad things can’t happen there. Even the administration — those great liberal equalizers — knew in the late 1990s to fight the Allen Metropolitan Housing Authority’s scattered site plan that ended up placing subsidized housing across Woodlawn Avenue from the boulevard.

• Perhaps it’s police involvement. The Wilson shooting came at the hands of 31-year veteran Sgt. Joe Chavalia, who wrote the department’s use-of-force policy. The Lima Police Department was working to make the city safer by removing one dealer, pushing drug traffic a little. If a cop shots a person, throw reason out the window as you tarnish the deceased. The Westergaard shooting didn’t involve police — until after the fact, when the department’s harshest critics in the black community asked to work with police to help stop the shootings in the city.

• Which brings us to race. No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting Westergaard caused her own death, whereas it was a foregone conclusion that Wilson had. Putting aside the arguments that police do no wrong regardless of outcomes – forget about questioning policy — and that location matters, we’re left with race. It’s hardly unheard of for those in the black community to question their treatment under the law compared to what whites receive. The law, for the most part, tends to follow popular opinion — lawmakers needing the favor of voters to retain their positions. So, minus all the accusations made against Wilson, we’re left with Westergaard being a victim.

Could the difference in opinion be based on skin color? Most of us are white. Could seven of 10 people in Lima, almost nine in 10 countywide, having mothers who look more like Westergaard than Wilson affect opinions about blame? Perhaps a dead white woman brings it closer to home that this unwinnable drug war — kicking down doors to shift traffic, creating gangs to control an illegal activity — kills innocent people.

Such results apparently are easier to stomach when the dead person doesn’t look like you.

Ronald Lederman Jr. is editorial page editor of The Lima (Ohio) News. E-mail him at rlederman@limanews.com. Lederman appears at 3:30 p.m. Mondays on “Talk With Ron Williams,” on Lima’s ESPN station, 940 AM, or www.espnlima.com.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.