The day after Christmas, Chicago police killed two people—Bettie Jones (55) and Quintonio LeGrier (19). The police were responding to a domestic disturbance call.

Things this close to a violent event are usually murky, but according to most accounts, LeGrier’s father called police because the teenager was threatening him with an aluminum bat, and he asked Jones, his downstairs neighbor, to let the police in when they arrived. 

According to several press sources (I haven’t been able to see the actual press release), Chicago police issued a statement that read, in part, “Upon arrival, officers were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of the officer’s weapon which fatally wounded two individuals. The 55 year old female victim was accidentally struck and killed.”

That statement is all in the passive voice. 

The passive is when you say something in a way that says something happened but no one did it, no one was responsible. It is like when you see a dish that had been full of cookies on the floor and a chagrined kid standing nearby and you say, “What happened?” and the kid says, “It fell.” 

Dishes don’t fall. People drop them. Weapons don’t discharge; people pull the triggers.  

The police PR response could have been: “Upon arrival, officers were confronted by a combative subject, at which point they shot him seven times and also accidentally killed a woman who had nothing to do with the event.”

They didn’t do that. They said instead that the “officers were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of the officer’s weapon which fatally wounded two individuals.” Sorry for the repetition, but it is staggering in the way it distances anyone from any responsibility for two deaths.

If you trust grammar, the only active agent there is “the officer’s weapon which fatally wounded two individuals.” Guns are inanimate objects. They do not just “fatally wound two individuals.” And these “two individuals” weren’t “wounded”: They were killed. 

The facts on this will unfold, but for now, we know three things:

1. The Chicago police department’s immediate response, reflected in the language it used, was an immediate distancing from the horrific event that occurred: a teen-ager and a neighbor shot to death over a domestic dispute. Nobody did anything or hurt anybody before police got there, then two people got killed.
2. These killings come on the heels of other highly questionable Chicago police killings, such as that of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer more than a year ago, and other events that forced Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fire the city’s police superintendent, Gerry McCarty. Whatever slack Emanuel may have gotten by pushing McCarty out was snapped back in that fusillade of gunfire in that apartment stairway Saturday. 
3. Chicago is, as CBS News called it in 2012, “The False Confession Capital” of the US, because its police practices have been so brutal and unmonitored, and accepted by local prosecutors. Those practices were so corrupt a former governor of Illinois commuted all the state’s death sentences (most of which came from Chicago). 

Language matters. The Nazis used terminology of getting rid of insects to describe what they were doing to the people they were slaughtering in the camps. Describing the killing of two people in a trivial disturbance entirely in the passive voice turns it into a clinical event, something at which no human was present and for which no human was responsible.

But two people are dead, one of whom, if the current accounts have it right, died only because she opened the door for the police.

Years ago I talked with a dying old man in the terminal care ward in a prison in Huntsville, Texas. His name was Pete McKenzie. He told me he’d had a death sentence, but it had been commuted because there had been a death row escape plot he hadn’t taken part in. I asked what he had gotten the death penalty for.

“There was a gunfight of three, four plainclothes officers and myself,” he said. “I wasn’t committing any crime, though I was on escape from here. I was armed, that’s where I violated the law. But I wasn’t committing any crime. I wasn’t trying to commit any crime. I was attending to my own business, but the situation developed to such an extent where there was a gunfight and the gunfight put wounds in my legs and I started shooting after I had been shot.” 

“Did you get any of them?” I asked him.

“A chief of detectives was killed.”

I asked McKenzie what he had been serving time for when he had escaped from the penitentiary.

“Murder,” he said.

“And what were you carrying when the police came up on you?”

“I had a Luger and a .38.”

“So you were carrying two guns, you were escaped from a murder sentence, and you killed one of the cops trying to bring you back to prison.”

“That’s the way they said it was!”

Pete McKenzie’s distancing himself from the murder of that chief of detectives in Texas so many years ago and the Chicago police department’s press release on Saturday’s killings are in the same language. Something happened. No one is responsible for them. There are swell passive voice reasons for all of them. 

For Tamir Rice. For Eric Garner. For Walter Scott. For Michael Brown. And for Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrief.

Passive voice reasons will not do. We all know how dangerous law enforcement work is. When violence happens, someone should be able to say, “I did it because…” If there is a good reason, most of us can accept that. Not “It happened.” That is never acceptable.

Cancer happens, tidal waves happen. Earthquakes happen. There are a lot of reasons why bad things happen. People get shot because someone pulls the trigger. There is no other reason for people getting shot.

Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and the James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo.