Say Their Names: Latino Lives Lost to Police Brutality

In America, police brutality is often viewed in a Black and white narrative leaving Indigenous, Latino, and other people of color out of the conversation.

The public debate about police brutality portrayed by the media tends to focus on the issue in a binary format. By portraying the conversation in Black and white, Latino and other voices of color are left silenced. If the media and the public at large continue to view the issue in a narrow and limited view, the response to it will also remain narrow and limited.

In 2016, the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling dominated the news cycle. However, in the same week, five Latinos were killed by police and hardly anyone knows about them. Not only was the media negligent in reporting those cases (showing a severe case of bias), the lack of attention creates an environment of ignorance. People simply don’t know or care to know that it’s happening on a larger scale resulting in lower numbers protesting their deaths.

They were Pedro Villanueva, Melissa Ventura, Anthony Nuñez, Raúl Saavedra-Vargas, and Vinson Ramos.

While most shooting deaths of Latinos at the hands of police don’t make national headlines, it’s worth noting that protests focused on state-sponsored violence against the Latino community have been happening since the 1940s. The majority of Americans neglecting our communities comes partly from the presumption that most Latinos are viewed as foreigners.

More recently, several Latinos, as well as several Black men, have been murdered by police in the span of just a few weeks in Houston. Many of these deaths occurred prior to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Of the more prominent cases in Houston, the death of Nicholas Chávez has created public outcry because of cell phone video showing him being shot by at least five Houston police officers as he was on his knees with his hands up.

As we have seen time and again, a lack of transparency is how many of these incidents go underreported, resulting in a lack of public outcry. Activists in Houston have been demanding the release of bodycam footage from no less than 70 officers showing evidence of the murder. As cable news hailed Houston police chief Art Acevedo as a hero after the death of George Floyd, what they failed to address is the lack of transparency and accountability in his own department

This level of tone-deafness has never been more evident.

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