When their miniature Doberman started raising a ruckus one night in late July, Gerald Sykes and his wife, Margot, woke up to investigate, and Margot caught sight of men moving on their back deck.
Gerald grabbed his shotgun—filled with birdshot to scare, but not kill, the intruders—but before he even got to the back door, the men on the deck shot him through the glass. The 76-year-old fired off one shot of his own (which didn’t hit anyone) before retreating back to bed.
He dialed 911 and begged for help. “Please send the police,” Gerald said. “I’ve been shot. I am going to die.” Meanwhile, his panicking wife called her daughter. “She was crying, close to hysteria,” the daughter later recalled. “She said ‘Jerry’s been shot. They shot him right through the door…'”
Fortunately, Gerald survived. And when he woke up in the hospital the next day, he was eager to find out of the police had caught “the bad guys that shot me.”
Only it turns out, the people who shot him were the police.
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Officers came to Gerald’s house in the middle of the night, but they had the wrong address. And instead of figuring that out in a reasonable, calm manner, they shot an elderly man before even trying to talk to him.
Needless to say, Gerald is having trouble processing the whole thing:
“Jerry, you were shot by the police,” his step-daughter Diana LaFalce told him.
The 76-year-old man was “flabbergasted,” LaFalce recalled Tuesday from her family’s Upper Deerfield Township home where the shooting occurred.
“His eyes got huge and said ‘no way, that was not the police that shot me’ and I said ‘I’m sorry that absolutely was’.”
“He just kept shaking his head,” LaFalce said. “He couldn’t believe it.” …
He is angry that this happened because it should not have happened. He can’t understand how or why it happened,” [Gerald’s friend and attorney, Rich] Kaser said.
“He still respects law enforcement, but he certainly is looking at that in a little bit different light.”
I would imagine he is.
I share this story not for the shock value—though it’s certainly shocking—but because it’s a sad reminder of how aggressive policing can affect anyone, at any time, and in any place in America.
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Yes, out-of-control police practices do affect minorities disproportionately, and we should not shy away from recognizing and addressing that systemic bias head-on.
Particularly after the last two years of high-profile police killings of black men that are too often closed without consequences for the officers responsible, it is no surprise that black people in particular feel that they are not safe in America, that they must guard their children against police brutality, that their lives are not equally valued by our legal system.
But you don’t have to be a young black man to have your life seriously disrupted or even ended by police misconduct. You can be an old white man, peacefully sleeping in your own home in the middle of the night, just like Gerald Sykes. You can be a 12-year-old girl—an honor student helping her parents with a chore—and get arrested in your own front yard by police searching for a prostitute. You can even be an innocent toddler sleeping in your crib and get maimed for life by a flash-bang grenade tossed by a cop.
As long as human error exists, police will continue to end up at the wrong house in the middle of the night. That’s not ideal, but honest mistakes happen. The problem is that as long as those same police are heavily militarized, anyone could and will become the next victim of police brutality.
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