In Sedalia, Mo., a cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop seven weeks earlier. Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond, reports the New York Times. Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists have struggled to get justice and even make themselves heard. They say making changes can be tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials support law enforcement and are leery of calls to defund the police. The deputy who shot Fizer has not been charged or disciplined, and her parents have received no updates about the investigation into her June 13 death.
There are hundreds of stories of law enforcement killings in small towns and rural areas, but little research into how and why they happen. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that between 2013 and 2019 there was a slight rise in shootings by officers in rural and suburban areas and a decline in big cities. Experts tie rural shootings to higher rates of gun ownership, a lack of mental health services, or insufficient training for officers responding to people in crisis. A Pettis County sheriff’s deputy pulled Fizer over for speeding. Sheriff Kevin Bond said the deputy was “met with verbal resistance,” and she claimed she had a gun and threatened to kill him. Investigators found no gun in her car. David Hemenway of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center said the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.