NEW YORK—When 18-year-old Sheneque Proctor died in an Alabama county jail in November, it didn’t draw the kind of national attention that has become so common after a civilian’s death at the hands of police. Arrested for disorderly conduct, she was found dead in her cell less than 24 hours later, and the cause of death—released two months later—was a drug overdose.
Her death sparked an online petition to call for a federal investigation alleging that Proctor, an asthmatic, possibly died of neglect while in police custody. Over 10,000 people have signed it.
Proctor’s case is not necessarily unusual, though.
“There certainly have been in cases where people are in police custody and they die from a combination of police abuse and neglect, sometimes just neglect,” said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP) in New York City. He said that sometimes those arrested don’t even make it to a cell. He said that all too often when someone has been injured or killed in the process of being arrested, they are “ignored,” as happened with Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown.
“Police not only engage in excessive force, but then insufficiently attending to people who have been injured and it reflects a cavalier attitude toward people who have been injured,” he said.
Nobody to Record
In New York City, the largest police force in the country often comes under scrutiny and faces lawsuits over treatment of those in custody. But elsewhere in the United States there are regular instances of men and women dying after being incarcerated. The difference when compared with the more high-profile cases is that there is nobody to record the death with a cellphone and public records are difficult to obtain.
A simple Internet search reveals that multiple reports of deaths in police custody under odd circumstances are regularly reported by local media outlets.
An Orange County, Calif., man arrested for domestic violence was found hanged in his cell on New Year’s Day. In an Allegheny County, Pa., jail, a 28-year-old man in good health was dead of jaundice within two months of being locked up. In Huntsville, Ala., a 19-year-old man arrested for shoplifting died of gangrene on the floor of his cell soon after he was locked up. On Rikers Island in New York City, a homeless man baked to death in his cell.
