Free Republic

The decision of a St. Louis grand jury to not indict a police officer there of shooting and killing an unarmed man has raised new interest in an officer involved fatal shooting in Salt Lake City. Dillon Taylor, a white male, was shot and killed in August. Officer Bron Cruz, who was described as non-white, shot Taylor once in the chest and once in the stomach after he refused to obey police.

On the surface, the cases appear nearly identical: Michael Brown and Dillon Taylor, two young, unarmed men with sketchy criminal pasts shot to death by police officers two days apart. But while the world knows of the highly publicized situation involving 18-year-old Mr. Brown, whose Aug. 9 death in Ferguson, Missouri touched off violence, protests and an angry national debate, most people outside Utah have never heard of 20-year-old Mr. Taylor. Critics say there’s a reason for the discrepancy in media coverage: race. Mr. Brown was black and the officer who shot him was white. Mr. Taylor wasn’t black —...

A brutal natural experiment is underway demonstrating the role of race, riots, and radicals in determining whose death is noted, and whose ignored in racialized America when unarmed young men are shot and killed by police. While American and world media, along with the President and Attorney General of the United States, obsess over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson, Missouri police, few people outside of Utah have heard of the remarkably parallel and contemporaneous death of Dillon Taylor, an unarmed young man (and father-to-be) from a gun shot by a Salt Lake City policeman,...