Fatal shooting of one-year-old boy ignites tensions in Mississippi town

The recent fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by police who were responding to a shoplifting call has ignited simmering tensions between police and Black residents in the small town of Senatobia, Mississippi . The death of Kohen Wiley is the latest in a series of troubling encounters with police that have outraged community members in recent years. It has led to protests and calls for greater police accountability in the town of 8,000, with some civil rights activists pointing to Kohen’s death as another example of a Black life lost over something of nominal value. In this case, it was an allegation of stolen diapers, which the boy’s family has denied. “We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child,” Bernice King, the daughter of late US civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, said in a statement posted to Instagram. “That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse.” Differing accounts of what happened There are still many unanswered questions about the shooting and what led up to it. Senatobia police responded to the shoplifting call at a local Walmart on 14 June, a Sunday, where they found two women and a child leaving the store, getting into a car and driving away. According to a statement released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI): “Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. …