A CHILD SHOULD NOT DIE OVER PROPERTY
By Verity Vox
NewsXR Editorial
One-year-old Kohen Wiley is dead after what began as an alleged shoplifting call at a Mississippi Walmart. Police converged on a vehicle carrying Kohen, his mother and another woman after the women were accused of stealing diapers and baby clothing. Video shows the car reversing into another vehicle and later accelerating forward as officers surrounded it, appearing to move toward at least one officer before shots were fired. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has since determined that the officer who fired used justified force.
But I believe there is a larger question here than whether an officer can legally justify pulling the trigger during the final seconds of a rapidly escalating confrontation.
Why did an alleged property offense ever reach the point where somebody’s life was in danger?
We routinely expect ordinary citizens to exercise restraint when confrontation can be avoided. Society generally tells a person that property alone does not justify taking another human life, that unnecessary escalation should be avoided, and that walking away can sometimes be the responsible choice. If we expect that restraint from ordinary citizens, we should expect at least as much from the professionals we authorize, train and pay to exercise governmental force.
That is not an argument against policing. Quite the opposite. We should be better equipping, better funding and better training police so they can become world-class practitioners of non-lethal intervention, psychological de-escalation, behavioral recognition, tactical disengagement and decision-making under stress. Officers should have the training and tools to recognize when backing off for thirty seconds, creating distance, slowing an encounter down or allowing a suspect to escape temporarily will protect more lives than forcing an immediate confrontation. That is not weakness. That is professional mastery.
That does not mean people should be allowed to steal without consequence. It does not mean a driver has the right to endanger an officer while fleeing. And it does not mean an officer confronted with an actual imminent threat must simply stand there and allow himself or someone else to be struck. It means something much more basic: apprehending someone right now should not automatically be treated as more important than preventing an avoidable death.
Sometimes the safer decision will mean somebody gets away.
So what?
Get the license plate. Identify the suspect. Investigate. Make the arrest later when it can be done without surrounding a vehicle containing a baby and creating a confrontation in a crowded parking lot. Property can be recovered or replaced, and a suspect who escapes for the moment can still face accountability tomorrow. A dead child does not get tomorrow.
That distinction matters when evaluating what happened to Kohen Wiley. The available video shows a chaotic and dangerous situation. Officers were approaching with guns drawn. The vehicle reversed into another automobile and then moved forward through officers positioned around it. Those facts matter when judging what the officer faced in the immediate moment he fired, but they do not answer the larger question of whether police tactics helped create a situation in which deadly force suddenly became an option at all.
The state answered the narrow legal question by concluding that the officer’s use of force was justified. I am asking the question that comes before it: was this confrontation necessary?
Kohen’s family does not believe the shooting was justified. Their attorney argues that the officer’s body-camera footage and the physical evidence show the fatal shot came from the side of the vehicle rather than from directly in its path. That dispute deserves continued scrutiny. But even if the state’s legal determination ultimately stands, legality does not automatically settle questions of judgment, proportionality or whether a different police response could have prevented the circumstances that led to a one-year-old child’s death.
Neither woman in the vehicle has been charged with shoplifting. That does not establish what happened inside Walmart, but it makes the scale of what followed even harder to ignore. An accusation involving diapers and baby clothing led to multiple officers converging on a vehicle, gunfire, an injured driver and a dead baby. There has to be room in policing for the professional judgment that says this is not worth somebody dying.
Police have difficult jobs. They encounter people who flee, lie, resist, panic and sometimes make extraordinarily dangerous decisions. But the authority society gives law enforcement is precisely why restraint should be expected of them, and why society has an obligation to give them the resources to exercise it successfully. We should not merely demand better judgment from officers and then send them into volatile encounters without the staffing, training, technology, psychological preparation and non-lethal capabilities necessary to make better outcomes possible.
The same principle should apply to private security. Protect the store. Document the theft. Preserve evidence. Call police. But do not turn merchandise into something worth spilling blood over when another course is reasonably available.
There will always be circumstances where force cannot be avoided. There will always be moments when an officer genuinely has seconds to respond to a threat that someone else created. Nothing in this editorial denies that reality. What I reject is the idea that the existence of legal justification at the end of an encounter should prevent us from examining every decision that helped bring everyone to that deadly moment.
We should expect more from policing because we should invest more in policing. Train officers to be masters of de-escalation, human behavior, tactical patience and non-lethal intervention. Give them the equipment, staffing and support to control situations without unnecessarily taking lives. The goal should not simply be determining afterward whether a shooting was legally justified. The higher goal should be creating police forces so skilled at managing human conflict that avoidable shootings happen far less often in the first place.
Because sometimes the most responsible exercise of authority is allowing someone to get away today so everybody remains alive tomorrow.
A civilized society should never become comfortable with an avoidable death over property. No package of diapers, clothing, electronics, groceries or anything else sitting on a retail shelf is worth a human life.
And certainly not the life of a one-year-old child.
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