Writing a column that covers the fatal police shooting of a one-year-old boy and the handcuffing of young Black children on London streets raises a pressing question: how much longer can this brutality be allowed to destroy children and shatter communities?
Two stories in particular stand out. One is the fatal shooting of one-year-old Kohen Wiley in a Mississippi supermarket car park, where police had responded to a report of shoplifting. The other is the reported case in Florida where police were called by upset parents to deal with a three-year-old excelling at football against their children. Officers were called to a youth sports field in Winter Park, resulting in the boy and his family being escorted away.
Fatal shooting in Mississippi
Kohen Wiley was shot dead by officers in the incident. The officer's lawyer claimed his client "had no choice but to discharge his weapon" and that the "outcome of the investigation was not only expected, but it was overdue." Kohen was just a year old when he was fatally shot.
Kohen's mother, Vellesiya, has not been charged with any crime after claims she and a friend had stolen nappies. She had denied the allegation and, with a friend, had left the supermarket, holding Kohen. The police officer responsible for killing the child, 33-year-old Sgt Hunter Foster, has since resigned. He had fired into the moving vehicle the Wileys were inside. Kohen had been sitting on his mother's lap.
Conflicting accounts of the shooting
Foster's lawyer argued in a statement to the BBC that the car driver was attempting to kill law enforcement. The Wiley family's lawyer, Ben Crump, argued that the distressing bodycam footage, released last week, showed Foster firing at the car from the right hand side, disputing that the officer was in imminent danger. An independent autopsy commissioned by the family reached a similar conclusion.
Kohen's death is just the latest among the hundreds of children killed by US police in the past 10 years alone. A sobering study, published four months ago by Yale researchers, found that between 2003 and 2024, 270 child deaths had been caused by law enforcement.
Broader pattern of treatment
The common denominator in these cases is young Black children and their families treated by law enforcement with scant sensitivity. This column has previously discussed the case of Child Q, the menstruating teenage girl strip-searched by Met Police officers after being wrongly accused of possessing drugs a few years ago. The drugs accusation sparking that violation was found to be false.
Two months ago, the column also covered the case of a young, innocent Black boy, no older than 10 or 11, made to lie face down by a Met Police officer who had handcuffed him unnecessarily in East London. Regular readers will also know that Black children are up to eight times more likely to be strip-searched, face higher rates of stop-and-search and experience inflated risk assessments in the justice system when evaluating their potential to reoffend. In other words, even as youngsters, the data shows that Black people are seen by police as more of a threat.
Kohen would have celebrated turning two this coming Sunday. Instead he has become yet another addition to a damning statistic that makes you want to weep.
