Thursday, October 1, 2020

13 Names: Sureshbhai Patel, Wangsheng Leng + 11

Content warning: mention of injury or death by violence.
composite portrait with Indian man's face on left and Chinese man's face on right, framed by list of 11 names

In 2015, Sureshbhai Patel was detained by police while on a walk around his neighborhood. A neighbor called the police on him, describing him as a "black man". Video footage showed that the 57-year-old grandfather from India was NOT resisting police. An officer seriously injured Patel's neck in a needless takedown. Patel was partially paralyzed and had to learn to walk again. In 2017, police broke the neck of Wangsheng Leng, a 66-year-old with Alzheimer's, while restraining him in his own home. Leng was taken to the hospital and died a month later. Both Leng and Patel did not speak English; their unfortunate encounters had been attributed in part to their inability to communicate with police officers. But many other unarmed individuals with no language barrier with police officers have died in similar encounters: