The Names You Don’t Hear

Widening the Aperture on Police Killings

Police killings of African-Americans has been called a national shame, an ongoing tragedy, and, during the height of the pandemic, a pandemic too.

The names you know— George Floyd, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Eric Garner, Irvo Otieno, Tyrie Nichols arrived with footage, fury, and a framing: police violence as a racial reckoning. They were marched down boulevards, printed on signs, and spoken in chants.

The names you don’t know came just as dead:Joseph Frasure Jr., Billy Dewayne Couch, Thomas “TJ” Siderio, or Edmond Exline.

Joseph Frasure Jr. was unarmed, cleaning out his grandmother’s garage in Ohio when police, responding to a burglary call, shot him dead. Billy Dewayne Couch died in Georgia, also unarmed, fleeing a traffic stop. Twelve-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio was shot and killed in Philadelphia; the officer now faces murder charges. And in West Virginia, Edmond Exline was tased in custody and died soon after. The governor watched the video. He called it “very concerning.” The public hasn’t seen it.

All four were white.

They are among at least 66 white people killed by police in the past year, double the number of Black victims. And yet: Black Americans make up less than 14 percent of the population. The math doesn’t lie, and the disparity is real—but so is this: America has a police killing problem that cuts deeper than race.

Next year if not one Black person were killed by law enforcement the United States would still have, by far, the highest rate of citizens killed by police of any country in the developed world.

In 2022, police killed 19 unarmed white people and 12 unarmed Black people. Those numbers are smaller than most Americans believe. But they’re each tragic. And in every category—armed or unarmed, compliant or fleeing—the United States leads the developed world in police-caused deaths.

This year, if not a single Black person were killed by law enforcement, America would still lead the developed world in the number of civilians killed by police. That fact is not meant to minimize the racial disparities—it is meant to underscore the size of the system behind them.

And yet, much of the national conversation remains narrowly framed. The dominant narrative is that police violence is primarily, or even exclusively, a racial issue. There’s a reason for this: it’s the story most powerfully told. Videos like the one that captured George Floyd’s final moments are horrifying, galvanizing, and unforgettable. They gave a clear, undeniable shape to something long denied.

But the singular focus on race may obscure the broader truth: that American policing produces a level of civilian death, across all demographics, that is unique among wealthy nations. That problem is racial. It is also structural, legal, and cultural. And treating it as one thing may make it harder to solve.

The public perception of police violence is shaped by which cases receive attention. Some incidents—horrifying, graphic, and racially charged—become widely known. Others do not.

---

Like George Floyd, Tony Timpa died in Dallas after a police officer knelt on his back for more than fourteen minutes. His name is unfamiliar to most.

---

Like Philando Castillo, Ryan Whitaker was shot in the back after opening the door to his apartment.

---

Like Army Lieutenant Lt. Caron Nazario, Daniel Shaver—unarmed and crawling in a motel hallway—was killed while trying to comply with contradictory police commands.

None became hashtags. Their stories weren’t less sympathetic. Just less visible.

Activists often argue that police reform can’t happen unless the public sees the true stakes. But what if the stakes are already bigger than the public knows?

The effects of this selective attention are measurable. Polls show that white Americans are the only demographic group to believe that “major” reform is unnecessary. That may reflect not opposition, but distance. If police violence is seen exclusively as a Black issue, then many Americans are allowed—by the narrative, if not by the facts—to remain on the sidelines.

From the time he wrote Race Racism and American Law in 1973 Derek Bell spoke of “interest converge theory.” This was the idea that meaningful change in American race relations happens only when there is a convergence of interests across racial lines. On paper, that convergence already exists.

None of this should be taken to mean that race doesn’t matter. It clearly does. Black Americans remain more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and killed by police. But if the ultimate goal is reform—legal, structural, cultural—then the narrative may need to widen to match the data. Not to dilute the problem, but to sharpen our response.

Recently on my podcast, The Gist, I interviewed Todd Brewster, who, along with Marc Lamont Hill, wrote Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice.

The book takes a semiotic approach to the visual archive of police violence, tracing the imagery of murdered African Americans through decades of American history. When I spoke with Todd Brewster—longtime ABC News producer and co-author of Seen and Unseen—I asked about the dominant narrative: that police in America kill Black men with distressing frequency. But I also asked about the story that gets far less attention—the one in which police kill Americans of all races at a rate unmatched by any developed nation.

Brewster pointed to an example he often shares with his journalism students.

“Think of a story as a piece of sculpture,” he said. “Stand in one place and you see one thing. Move a few steps and you see something entirely different. But it’s the same object. You just need to understand the full shape.”

We’ve been taught to look at one side of the sculpture. And in many ways, that’s progress. The widespread visibility of police abuse—through body cams, cellphone footage, and viral video—is a marked shift from the pre-digital era of denial and opacity. But visibility isn’t the same as clarity. Increasingly, the platforms and institutions that shape public attention—media outlets, social feeds, activist messaging—are narrowing the frame so tightly that they risk distorting the full picture.

A narrative that is too tightly drawn may stir outrage. But it can also stall reform.

What would progress look like? It might begin with a shift in how we tell these stories. Less emphasis on the exceptional, more on the pattern. Less on martyrdom, more on institutional design. And a clearer acknowledgment that you can’t tell the story of American policing if you ignore racism, it is not the only reason so many Americans are dying at the hands of the state.

Some reforms have stalled. Others never got off the ground. Part of the reason is political. Another part is strategic. If the public only sees part of the sculpture, they can’t grasp its full shape, and they’re less likely to demand that it be changed.

There may also be a psychological benefit to widening the lens. When the story of police violence is told as a uniquely Black burden, it deepens the sense of racial isolation—and with it, the trauma. Studies have shown that both the narrative and the reality of police killings of Black men can trigger PTSD-like symptoms in other Black men. That should come as no surprise. The belief that Black men are being “literally hunted, or that Police Kill Black Males with Impunity is widespread.

But framing the crisis more broadly might offer some relief. If the country better understood that these encounters affect Americans of all backgrounds, it could shift the emotional burden from one group to many. That wouldn’t erase the disproportionate impact on Black communities, nor should it. The most effective way to reduce that trauma, of course, is to reduce the trauma itself: fewer Black Americans killed by police each year, a number that still hovers around 250; fewer homicides overall in Black communities, which surpassed 14,000 in 2021.

But to get there, we have to see the whole field. The dangerous moments between police and civilians—whether they end in death or simply fear—can’t be reduced to one narrative without distorting the scale of the problem. If the aim is prevention, the strategy has to begin with clarity. And clarity starts with a fuller view.