The city of Oakland has agreed to pay $1.2 million to the family of a man shot to death by police who found him unconscious in his car. The settlement, which brings to a close two separate lawsuits filed by Demouria Hogg's family, will be split among his mother, two children and one other family member.
Oakland Police officer Nicole Rhodes shot and killed Hogg on the morning of June 6, 2015, after firefighters spotted him sleeping in a BMW parked near Lake Merritt with a handgun resting on the passenger seat next to him. Rhodes and two other officers spent the next hour trying to wake Hogg with a bullhorn, loudspeakers and by firing beanbag rounds to break out the car's windows.
When they finally roused him, officer Daniel Cornejo-Valdivia used a stun gun on Hogg while Rhodes fired two shots into the car, according to an amended complaint. Hogg was pronounced dead at Highland Hospital. John Burris, an attorney for Hogg's son, said that
Hogg didn't wake up right away because he was hard of hearing. He said the officers should have given Hogg time to comply with their orders before shooting him. Instead, the family
claimed, police killed him as soon as he awoke.
Hogg hadn't committed any crime or made any aggressive move that would have led officers to believe he was dangerous, the family said.
Comment: Dudgeon, a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Western Australia, has written before that the practice of psychology had been part of the "colonizing process" in Australia that had "objectified, dehumanized and devalued those from culturally different groups".
Social Darwinism was used by early Australian psychologists to describe Indigenous Australians as a primitive race, which in turn drove a series of research projects to study the mind of "primitive man". It was, she wrote, "a psychological determinism that has supported a racist agenda".
See also: Australian Psychological Society issues apology to Indigenous people for decades of mistreatment and exploitation