ON JULY 6, Nakia Jones, a police officer in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, was awakened by her teenage son bursting into her room, on the verge of tears. “Did you see the shooting?” he asked. The day before, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, someone had filmed two police officers tackling and then shooting to death a black man named Alton Sterling. The video showed in bloody detail how quickly an officer can take a life at point-blank range. The clip left Jones’s son, a straight-A student and captain of the school band, sad and confused. “Mom, not only am I afraid of being shot by another black male,” she recalls him saying. “Do I also have to be afraid of somebody who wears the same uniform as you do?”
Jones says she is the first black woman to serve on her town’s force, and she understands the split-second decision officers have to make when they face a threat (her husband is also a cop). But as a mother of four girls and two boys, she also knows that the next young black man killed by police could be one of her sons. As she watched the Sterling video, she felt torn in a way that she hadn’t before, despite similar incidents. Other police killings seemed justified, she had told her children, but this one made her feel different, as if she had “half of my body in a uniform and half of my body in civilian clothes.”