On Saturday, March 23, community activists gathered in the University District to march against what the Seattle Police Department called the "justified homicide" of a black man, Shawn Maxwell. This was not the only reaction to the February 18 U-District shooting. Five days after the incident, the NAACP of Seattle and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle requested that the FBI initiate an investigation.

These groups and activists were correct to draw attention to Maxwell's death; it seems the police resolved the situation with too much force (after wrangling with a faulty Taser, they brought Maxwell down with two bullets, and, while he was on the ground, fired two more bullets into his body). Calling attention to Maxwell's case seems just, but it unwittingly calls attention to another problem: Just a month earlier, the SPD killed a man named Adam L. Alexander not far from where they killed Maxwell. However, there was little or no public outcry about Alexander's death, because, evidently, he was white.

Alexander's case vanished from public memory, despite significant irregularities. Alexander wasn't carrying a real gun, and the officer who shot him, Jeff Johnson, was sued in 1997 by a fellow officer for having participated in the senseless beating of an arrested teenager. Even more curious, Johnson's partner, Stanley Streubel, was the officer who, a month later, fired the extra bullets into Maxwell.

Just two months before the Alexander shooting, a white male in Lake City, Anthony Shuster, was gunned down in circumstances similar to Maxwell's: Shuster had a knife, the Taser did not work, and the police fired when he lunged at them. Shuster's death barely generated a spark of media attention, because no community or organization or activist seemed to care about a dead white guy.

Granted, a disproportionate number of African Americans are killed by the SPD, but this is no reason for groups like the NAACP and the Urban League to ignore police shootings that involve white subjects. In fact, it would help bridge differences between working-class whites if police accountability activists offered a more universal approach to police work. The Urban League claims its demands for a federal inquiry on the Maxwell case are not race-related, but this raises an unavoidable question: Why were they silent about Alexander and Shuster's deaths?

Indeed, as long as black groups and white activists continue to deal with the problems of urban policing on purely racial terms, the police department's troubling tactics against working-class citizens like Alexander, Schuster, and Maxwell are likely to continue.