On Tuesday, Daquan woke up at 8 a.m. to beat the heat and play basketball with his friend at a park in Milwaukee’s King Park neighborhood, the heart of Black life in the city for nearly a century. But now the 17-year-old doesn’t know if he’ll ever step on that court again.
There at the park, less than a mile from the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, the teen witnessed five out-of-state police officers shoot and kill Samuel Sharpe Jr., a Black man who residents say was unhoused. Right before the shooting, Sharpe was allegedly in an argument with another unhoused man, and officers thought it could escalate into physical violence.
The situation unfolded rapidly, with 15 seconds passing from when officers first noticed Sharpe was armed with a knife to when they fired shots. Daquan, who only shared his first name, recalled what he witnessed at a press conference and rally later that day. He said he didn’t see a knife, although body cam footage released on Wednesday shows that Sharpe is holding something sharp in his hand. City officials said two knives were found at the scene.
The fatal shooting solidified the pre-convention fears of many of the city’s Black residents. When they heard thousands of out-of-state police officers would descend on the city for the convention, they were alarmed. In the days leading up to the RNC, many Black residents told Capital B they had a sense that violence would spill over into their community.
The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania the Saturday before only intensified those concerns. As part of a mutual aid agreement between Milwaukee and more than 60 other law enforcement agencies, an estimated 4,000 extra officers were given jurisdiction in the city for the convention.
At a brief press conference after Tuesday’s shooting, Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said the group of police officers from Columbus, Ohio, were in their assigned zone related to RNC duties for potential demonstration response. Data analyses show that Columbus police officers are among the most lethal nationwide. Of similar-sized cities, Columbus has seen the second-most police killings since 2013.
Karla White Carey, a Columbus resident, told Capital B she wasn’t surprised that the city’s police department was deployed for the event and of the fatal outcome.
“I thought to myself, well, they got the right ones because they’re trigger-happy anyway,” she said.
Moments before Sharpe was killed, body cam footage shows that the officers were gathered just a few yards away from where the altercation between Sharpe and the other man took place. The officers were debating abortion access and women’s rights.
“Why [were the] officers in this area in the first place?” wondered Radontae Ashford, a pastor at Infinite Church in Milwaukee who has volunteered with the area’s unhoused residents. “Nobody should be dead, especially somebody who was in their neighborhood.”
In a statement following the shooting, a coalition of half a dozen Black-led Wisconsin community organizations said, “We knew that bringing the RNC, without community input, would heighten the risks and make our city less safe,” particularly when out-of-state officers “had no accountability to Milwaukee residents.”
It’s sad, Daquan said, that kids can’t even play basketball anymore without bearing witness to the threat of gun violence.
“They could have shot me,” he said. “I’m young, and I’ve already lost too many people to gun violence.”
Richard Shaw, a Milwaukee pastor who organized a protest the Sunday before the shooting, foreshadowed the incident, explaining that he feared for the safety of Black and brown communities around the RNC.
“We’re concerned about the safety of the people, and we want to make sure that our city officials are protecting both those who attend [the convention] and those who don’t,” he said last week. “You’re having this convention in the heart of Milwaukee, near communities that are in despair, and we just want to make sure that the people who live in this inner city are not taken advantage of.”
The Blacker the city, the more cops
Policing in Wisconsin has historically aligned with racial disparities. A 2020 analysis by Injustice Watch found that in Wisconsin, the Blacker a city is, the more officers the city employs and the more is spent on policing. Nationwide, Black people are roughly three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, according to a database that maps police violence. But in Wisconsin, Black people are nearly six times more likely.
Milwaukee residents have used this latest tragedy to highlight the stories of other Black men who have been killed by police, including Dontre Hamilton, a man with mental health issues who was shot by a police officer at a park in 2014. His mother attended the vigil for Sharpe on Tuesday.
“With the RNC, now the nation will see what is happening in Milwaukee, and it won’t just be swept under the rug,” Shaw said in response to the shooting. “We know that this is happening much too often. A matter of fact, one time is too much.”
The neighborhood where Sharpe was killed is 85% Black and, in recent years, has struggled with the ills of poverty, homelessness, and the drug trade. It is the kind of neighborhood that has been at the heart of the Republican Party’s talking points about an alleged rise in crime and homelessness nationwide.
Just hours after Tuesday’s shooting, during a RNC speech, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that due to Democrats’ policies, communities like King Park have seen “dramatic increases” in “violence, crime and drugs.” However, federal data shows that nationwide violent crime is lower than it was in 2020 and has been on a continuous drop since the end of 2022.
The mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, who is Black, also used the conference to explain why he switched from Democrat to Republican after being reelected last year, blaming the Black Lives Matter movement. The “woke Democrat Party,” he said, “is with the criminals.”
This rhetoric, some say, has contributed to increased policing and interactions that have led to a rise in police killings.
“I’m not part of the RNC. I don’t believe that this was their intention to come in and do this,” Ashford said. “But the bottom line is this has happened under their watch. Now they owe us an answer.”
A vigil was held Tuesday night for Sharpe, and protests extended well into Wednesday.
Shawana Baker, who knew Sharpe from his time at a local homeless shelter, told Wisconsin Watch that Sharpe should be remembered as “a peaceful, calm spirit just going through the struggles of life and trying to get over them.”
Protests against the RNC and in honor of Sharpe are planned for the rest of the week.
Staff writer Christina Carrega contributed to this report.
