A white man was involved in an hours-long stand-off with police and shot at officers through a door Monday evening in Brea, California. The suspect was shot with "less-lethal" bean bags and arrested at the scene of the stand-off in a Brea motel, according to ABC 7 Eyewitness News. The fact that the man who fired at police was not killed and was taken away into police custody has started another of many conversations about the preferential treatment white people receive from police.
The suspect was also tackled by a SWAT team, ABC 7 reported Monday, and was taken to the hospital to be treated for minor injuries.
For many, the arrest in Brea calls attention to the fact that it is possible for police officers to arrest people without seriously injuring or even killing them, a topic that is raised repeatedly in discussions of police brutality against people of color.
The Brea suspect certainly isn't the first white person to fire a weapon and not be fatally shot by police in pursuit of an arrest. Dylann Roof, the white shooter who allegedly shot and killed nine black people last year in Charleston, South Carolina was not shot by police when they arrested him, and cops bought Roof a meal from Burger King after he complained about being hungry after his arrest.
In 2014, Joseph Houseman, a white open-carry advocate in Michigan pointed a rifle at cops and insulted the officers who were asking him to drop his weapon, according to the Huffington Post. Houseman was shown on video with his gun, also yelling about starting a revolution. Houseman was not arrested, his rifle was confiscated, and he got the gun back a month later.
All of these arrests of white men who were armed, confessed to shootings, and shot at police stand in stark contrast to the recent fatal police shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Footage of the shootings of both men showed that they were not behaving in a threatening manner at the times they were shot by police. Tamir Rice was only 12 years old and holding a toy gun when he was fatally shot by police in Ohio, an open-carry state. There's also the case of Korryn Gaines, a black woman in Baltimore who was shot and killed after an armed stand-off with police where she did not fire her weapon.
