“We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
– J.K. Rowling
On January 23, 2023, a 26-year old graduate student from India who was studying at Northwestern University’s campus in Seattle, Jaahnavi Kandula, was hit by a police car while she was crossing the street. The officer who was driving the car was Kevin Dane who was driving at 119 km/hr while responding to a call about drug overdose. The impact threw Kandula 138 feet away, killing her.
In September this year, body camera footage was finally released by the Police Department, and there has since been a nationwide outlash. The footage shows the responding police officer, Daniel Auderer, the vice president of the police union, laughing and undermining the significance of her death.
“Yeah, just write a check,” he said into the phone. “She was 26 anyway. She had limited value”.
This has been especially painful for her family members, who are mourning all over again, almost 8 months after her death. There have been multiple protests focused on the officer’s lack of value for a human life, regardless of who it was.
A statement posted by the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild explains that this was only one side of the conversation and there is still much more to uncover. The statement said, “Without context, this audio is horrifying and has no place in a civil society. The video captures only one side of the conversation. There is much more detail and nuance that has not been made public yet.” In addition, it states that Auderer was mocking lawyers, the legal system and the way that it places a monetary value for a person. Auderer also claimed that he self-reported the comments, but the SPD attorney had already stated that it was an upset employee who reported it to their supervisor, rendering him wrong.
Although Auderer has had 29 OPA compliments since 2014, we do not know for sure what Auderer meant in the footage. While some have decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, many have been protesting on the streets of Seattle and many other places due to how horrifyingly he mocked a person’s life and judged their value. The president of the Telugu Association of North America said that the way her life was disvalued hurt many South Asians, especially ones who are also Telugu-speaking like Kandula was. Many immigrants already fear getting involved with authorities and this situation has only heightened that fear.